Faust Series Opus 9

Never to Arrive

2011-03-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

2nd April 20..

Dear Panamarenko,

We visited your exhibition on Wednesday at the Hayward Gallery and have felt compelled to write to you. Please forgive us intruding upon your privacy but we assure you the reasons are purely immanent.

For many years we have been working on a grand theory of accidents and philosophy of risk. We were quite excited to discover some corroboration for our theories in your own toy model of space. Your lecture on the subject caused some strange somatic reactions. After a while we were transported into an irresistible sleepiness although not the kind which excludes perception. Then we woke up very hungry exactly when you were writing E=MC2 on the blackboard. But the hunger which followed the stupor was the sort which left unheeded might lead to rapid loss of consciousness. Fortunately we could dash out of the gallery and eat some provisions. By the time we returned you were again writing E=MC2 on the blackboard. But we could follow your argument somewhat more consciously. Although we think its effect on the unconscious intelligence is far more powerful. You remark about your Hazerug or Schelpvormige Rugzak that it created so much noise the people around your test site fled in fear. Although obviously the object when activated is quite dangerous its noise serves to diminish the danger by warning of potential harm. Not so your lecture. The hermetic character of your theatre of proof which inspires the spectator with the intense desire to understand but withholds understanding in a tantalus-like fashion is far more dangerous. The stupor followed by utter depletion of blood sugars in the brain could be as fatal as being caught up in exploding motors.

We resolved not to want to understand — out of banal survival motives but also not to surrender to obfuscation either.

The part of your theatre of proof which seemed to glide effortlessly into our grand theory of accidents and philosophy of risk has to do with what you call “rolling on the space field”. Trying to be as brief as possible, one could say rolling elevates the “Stabilitätsunfall” or capsizing to one of the fundamental principles of motion in the universe. If one could imagine motion without bodies then what would be left in the universe is its constituent and primary vertigo (Schwindel). Your results seem to confirm something we have suspected for years. There is an occult correspondence between the laws governing the maritime accident and this constituent and primary vertigo of the universe. The maritime accident contains the secret to the construction of space.

We live in an area especially suited to the study of accidents at sea. Under dry dock conditions. Seafaring is almost forgotten but the accident at high sea has been preserved for tradition’s sake. The accidents are the last connection to the real life of the seafarer. The secret rule of thumb regarding accidents is one should never treat them as an exception. We were very intrigued by your explanation of the “containing force” - one wonders why explosions don’t happen spontaneously more often.

The same trigonometry which one uses to calculate navigation of shipping routes can be used just as well to calculate the accidents upon these routes. With one small addition - one calculates how the desired port of destination should under eternal circumstances never be reached. In this way one can quite easily transform the laws of navigation at sea into the laws of shipwrecks. Following a similar logic one can transpose the theorems of geometry into the theorems of the physics of rigid objects especially their change of positions. Einstein invented this transposition logic calling it “gravitation geometry”. “When we add only one proposition to the theorems of Euclidian geometry, that two points of a practically rigid body always correspond to the same distance (Strecke) whatever changes in the position we undertake with this body, thereby the theorems of Euclidian geometry become theorems about the possible relative shifting of practically rigid bodies. Geometry extended in this fashion would be treated as a branch of physics (...). The practically rigid body turns the straight line into a natural object.” (Einstein)

What is a better example of “possible relative shifting of practically rigid bodies” than the “Stabilitätsunfall” or capsizing of ships. Following your expositions of rolling one can imagine the circular motion of stars, sun, etc as the equivalent of the capsizing motion prolonged indefinitely on a gravityless field where there is no up or no down - hence no question of buoyancy. If a ship capsizes it is because its two essential centers of gravity are not aligned — the center of gravity of the ship’s total mass (M) and the center of the submerged part of the ship (F). In essence it is out of gravity when it capsizes. The one side entering the water at greater speed than the other as in “rolling”. But it usually rolls only once - as the capsizing leads it back to gravity or balance or rest. If it were in the space field presumably it would capsize forever like the other space bodies. “Un coup de dés/ jamais/ quand bien même lancé dans des/circonstances éternelles/ du fond d’un naufrage (…)” (“A throw of the dice/ Never/ Even thrown in/ Eternal circumstances/ From the bottom of a shipwreck (…)”, Mallarmé)

The accident is nothing special but it might be sometimes less, sometimes more than the normal case. It is a normal case with an unknown plus or minus. The unknown too much or too little also follows laws. As Kant writes - “Der Zufall hat Gesetze, zum Beispiel Schiffbrüche.” (“Chance has laws, for example shipwrecks.”) The same law simultaneously establishes the force of habit (Macht der Gewohnheit) and through the accident also cancels it. That is the first provisional axiom of the shipwreck. It is also a paradox. One does not imagine that a law can be confirmed and annulled in the same instant. But that happens in every accident. Not even just the unusual ones. An accident is always rare and equally very common, because it follows a law, or in other words, there are only common accidents which are rare. (“For the common is rare, and the common measure is, a rarity for the rare (…)” Jacques Derrida, “Loving in Friendship: Perhaps – the Noun and the Adverb” in The Politics of Friendship, London, 2005, p. 43)

That is the second provisional axiom. Therefore anything can happen at any time. Not only theoretically. The accident in the aquatic element still counts as the noblest sort of accident. But since going to sea is becoming almost extinct all manner of holiday accidents must suffice. One would think that the holiday accident would not qualify to be included in the grand theory of accidents because of the obvious absence of the “force of habit”.
But the holiday itself is an immense force of habit and as Horace says “you can change the skies but not the ideas” thus the grand theory of accidents and philosophy of risk can be extended to cover holiday accidents as well.

The exhibition of your fortune testing machines resembles an accident more than anything else because it promises so many ways of escaping all destinations. Hence effectively a rescue.

Yours sincerely,

Will to Finitude

2011-03-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

1. The Finite Mass – The Decomposing (Zerfallende) Object
2. “The Trinitarian Formula” – Power, Force, Resistance

1. The Finite Mass – The Decomposing (Zerfallende) Object

Nowadays the mass embodies the will to power. A ‘superman’ (Übermensch) only exists, if he can ceaselessly prove his kinship with the mass. As soon as he distances himself from them, his downfall starts. Inevitably this is also the downfall of the mass. That can all take a while. With the will to power of the mass arises a new concept of power– neither divine nor mythical nor even political – but finite. From Nietzsche one finds out much about will to power, whilst the emphasis is always on ‘will’. He divulges little about the nature of this power itself. For instance in “Human, All Too Human I” in section 460. “The Great Man of the Mass” he writes: “The mass must have the impression, that a powerful, impregnable will power is there; at least it must appear to be there. Everyman admires a strong will, because no one has one and everyman says to himself, that, if he had one, then for him and his egoism there could be no more limit.” (“Die Masse muss den Eindruck haben, dass eine mächtige, ja unbezwingliche Willenskraft da sei; mindestens muss sie da zu sein scheinen. Den starken Willen bewundert Jedermann, weil Niemand ihn hat und Jedermann sich sagt, dass, wenn er ihn hätte, es für ihn und seinen Egoismus keine Gränze mehr gäbe.”) Power seems to be closely related here to egoism – especially in its limitation. An indirect symbiosis exists between the strong will of the great man and the bounded egoism of the mass. The strong will of the great man is a surrogate limitlessness – the mass hopes from it the abolition of the limits of its own egoism.

But this in itself does not yet produce an unlimited power – power is always constrained by the familiar appetites of the mass, the restricted (finite) ways in which the mass experiences its desires. This is a finite power.

Such a mass, as actuality and potentiality (possibility), exists only since the storm on the Bastille. It is not a question of quantity. One person can be a mass for himself – as Tibull says, in solis sis tibi turba locis (In your solitude be your own popular unrest, Tibull, Eleg., IV, XIII, 12).
Threatening is when the mass pursues you like a Doppelgänger, trying to keep you from your projects and plans as if they were his own – as it happens in Kafka’s story “Entlarvung eines Bauernfängers” (Unmasking of a Swindler): “They placed themselves in front of us, as wide as they could; tried to hold us back from there towards where we were headed; prepared for us a dwelling in their own breast as an ersatz, and when the concentrated feeling in us finally reared up (rebelled), they took it as an embrace (…)” (“Sie stellten sich vor uns hin, so breit sie konnten; suchten uns abzuhalten von dort, wohin wir strebten; bereiteten uns zum Ersatz eine Wohnung in ihrer eigenen Brust, und bäumte sich endlich das gesammelte Gefühl in uns auf, nahmen sie es als Umarmung (...)”)

The mass feels itself (and no one contradicts it in this feeling) to be the highest value. To spread its hegemony over the whole world is the wish of the mass. The past empires were based on professional armies, rulers and their courts. The mass did not exist – Francis Bacon called the proto-mass “commons”, from which a ruler had little to fear with a few exceptions: “(…) there is little danger from them, except it be where they have great and potent heads; or where you meddle with the point of religion, or their customs, or means of life.” (“Of Empire” in Bacon’s Essays, New York, 1909, p. 160)

The recurring uprisings of the past such as the peasant wars were mostly instigated by professional groups. They had specific demands. Cromwell’s Army represented an early unusual hybrid of mass and professional association. The “New Model Army” drew its members from an amorphous population of “masterless men”. They transformed themselves in the course of the English Revolution into a regular force only to decompose back into nothingness again after the failure of the revolution. Lostness in the double sense – defeat and disappearance - masks the finitude of the army-mass. For Heidegger ‘lostness’ is a mode only of the singular Dasein – ‘foundness’ or what he calls destiny (Schicksal) takes place in the community or Volksgemeinschaft – but historically absolute lostness is only of the community – when a community is lost it becomes extinct.

Similarly, Badiou’s key concept of “fidelity to the event” (for instance to the event of the Revolution of 1917) hides a secret acknowledgement of finitude. In Badiou’s presentation the “fidelity” of a “subject” in the “situation” wavers continuously between finitude and infinitude. However, if the event were not finite, fidelity would be superfluous. His concept of “fidelity” is a disguised finitude. He thus dissolves any specific fidelity to an historical event into the fidelity of the finite subject-of-the event to itself: “(…)let’s be faithful to the event that we are.” (Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham, London, 2007, p. 236)

Badiou’s “fidelity to the event” is a quasi-mathematical transposition of Proust’s “à la recherche du temps perdu” (In Search of Lost Time) – whereby “lost” should be understood as equal to “finite”.

The mass itself does not know what it wants. It only wants to continue to exist (as Canetti says) in the feeling of unconditional ruling and desiring. Still, because the mass is finite, but the will of the mass to persist in its being is infinite, the mass experiences its decaying provisional nature as an enigma. The decaying mass moves from its ecstatic fusional ‘oneness’ back into its atomized particularity (the contingent many) – painfully recognizing if only for that brief moment of transition that ‘community’ is not “being-in-common” (Nancy) but a nihilistic “nothing-in-common” (Esposito). Community is not dwelling or shelter – it is abandonment – to the law and language (so-called ‘form of life’).

Just as in earlier times, the king was the figure who had much to fear and little to desire, today the mass finds itself in this royal condition of an unclear and wilting consciousness. The leader who rises up out of their ranks and who will be carried by them, must have the professional and full-time ability to protect the finite mass feeling from its falling apart. In this sense, according to Badiou’s system, such a leader would be the only faithful subject of the event of the mass. Eisenstein captures the electrifying galvanising effect of the leader in his commemorative film of the 1917 Revolution “October”. In the scene “At the Finland Station” the anxious mass waiting for the train presses together in darkness at the train station until someone shouts the redemptive word “It’s Him!” – all faces beam and a huge outpouring of delight banishes all doubts – Lenin arrives on the scene.

2. “The Trinitarian Formula” – Power, Force, Resistance

Power is often without force. It must not develop force, it is already beyond force. The force, which power first expended to become power, disappears into power itself. It will never again need the same expenditure of force as it did to first become power. Even when power seems to grow, it does so with a decreasing exercise of force. That explains the phenomenon, that powerful and ultra-powerful configurations are so easily overthrown.

Resistance on the other hand is pure expenditure of force – out of the point of powerlessness. Resistance requires an extraordinary quantum of will or will-power. Therefore the concept – will to power – is actually meaningless, objectless. When one has power, one does not need will. Only when you have no power, that means, when existing power systemically hinders you from having power – then you need will – not to power – but to resistance. Power is related to inertia. Power is not a dynamic concept. That is why all the directors in Kafka’s Castle are so tired.

There is no resistance in the world of the accident valet – because it is a world of pure power. Similar to the airless space of a vacuum – airplanes fly best there, because air resistance does not impede them. In general, the world of pure power is a world without any hindrance.

(Note: Author’s expanded translation of “Wille zur Endlichkeit” published in Noir Hybriden, 18th February 2010)

Possessions

2011-03-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

1. The Emptiness of ‘My’

2. Taking Ownership of Shame
3. ‘My’ Will

1. The Emptiness of ‘My’

The world is full of ‘my’ which is not ‘mine’. My Book, My Computer, My Documents, My Lord, MySpace, (Where’s) My Stuff, etc. Everyone knows this ‘my’ is an everyman – an anybody. Yet one says it with so much fervour of possession. Wittgenstein kept returning to the question of ‘my pain’. He concluded that it is impossible to know whose pain it is even if someone calls it his. Is this because pain is generic or is it the ‘my’? If you cannot be sure if your pain is yours, of what can you be sure? My happiness? Happiness is often illusory, based on false premises. Adorno says in “Minima Moralia”, anyone who says, “I am happy” is lying. (72) He or she can only say “I was happy”. When one is ‘in happiness’ one is not aware of being happy or unhappy – one just is. When someone says “I am happy” –he is trying to force happiness magically into his world. He gives birth to himself out of happiness – auto-parturition – to be able to see how he is in his happiness. An impossible exteriority.
He thus ‘sins’ against happiness, which can never be coerced nor possessed, and whose advent and departure are both slow and abrupt. Happiness is like truth in its elusiveness – one cannot have it, only be in it. Does that mean that unhappiness is like falsehood? And that when one says “I am unhappy” one is also lying? Or is unhappiness as the state of no longer being in happiness, expelled from all protective happiness shells, reflecting upon this state of expulsion (banishment), as much or more ‘in truth’ than happiness? Unhappiness is the general, happiness the particular of truth?

Are then your chimera your own – or do they belong to the age from which you have only borrowed them? Solely from the principle of the conservation of energy – why should any chimera exist merely for the benefit of a singular deluded ‘nullity’? A chimera collectivizes as much if not more than truth – just as a community is a chimera of being-with or being-in-common.

Whatever it is – ‘my’ denotes ownership, the key term of our mercantile times. Ownership should be the most tangible relation one could conceive. But it is not. Not to act or to be but to have – to be able to say ‘my’ establishes one’s firm roots in the soil of the real. But precisely this ‘my’ is a nobody, a figment of grammar. ‘My’ is a form of ‘linguistic alienation’, of identity shredded by grammar – the emptiness of the grammatical body corresponds in some ways to the emptiness of the body it designates.

In the colloquial manner of today – when everything, to make it simple, is couched in the first person – ‘my’ is an absence, a void to be filled by a transaction, an exchange of money for goods. The transaction creates the ‘my’. ‘My’ is a reflex and adjunct of possession of an object for which money has been paid. If someone gives you the object as a gift then you may also say it is ‘mine’ but the relationship of ‘my’ to that object is more tenuous. The giver might want it back. You have no rights of ownership as you may have if you have bought your ‘my’. A gift is always a favour which is riddled with traps of another sort. Perhaps by accepting the gift, the giver has ‘bought’ you – so that he can now say ‘my’ when referring to you. This is merely a transaction of a second degree. Your ‘my’ has been bought, rather than you buying a ‘my’ hegemony over an object. Mon pauvre (garcon).

Such are the complicated workings of community or communitas as discussed by Roberto Esposito. The obligations of community often leave you little choice in matters of gift-giving and gift-receiving unless the negative principle of immunitas exempts you from this bondage of the ‘law of the gift’. The Mafia is based on these sorts of patronage laws – the offer you can’t refuse. The community is a permanent lack like the ‘my’ itself – the absence of the gift one may never keep which keeps giving itself.
“This is why, if the members of a community are characterized by an obligation of gift-giving thanks to the law of the gift and of the care to be exercised toward the other, immunity implies the exemption from or derogation of such a condition of gift-giving. He is immune who is safe from obligations or dangers that concern everyone else, from the moment that giving something in and of itself implies a diminishment of one’s own goods and in the ultimate analysis of oneself.” (Interview with Roberto Esposito, T. Campbell in diacritics/summer 2006, pp. 50-51)

Given the phantom nature of ‘my’ - of possession in general – expropriation is not a very solid political aim. Ownership of the means of production is as empty as no ownership of the means of production. The ever-fluctuating emptiness of ‘my’ is a virtue (in the sense of power) of capitalism. Does ‘our’ have more substance than ‘my’?

2. Taking Ownership of Shame

One should become like Stendhal and look social debacles straight in the eye. Admit to shame and one’s own false ambition. Only in such moments does one sense one’s own superiority, to have committed these gruesome social offences and beyond that to implicate the entire society in one’s own loss of face. How hard it is to confess, one had wanted to make an unforgettable impression upon persons one holds in contempt – at least occasionally or temporarily. Why this is so – is ineffable. When these persons, objects of your disdain, (glad to have belonged to your cohors amicorum, commensales, to the friends of your table in better days) for their part, openly demonstrate their loathing, scorn, vapidly amuse themselves at your cost for all to see – that is when social shame has reached total ripeness. Shame is not a wound, no blood flows. Shame paralyzes, makes you feel cold and hot at the same time, goes away slowly like the numbness from a dental injection, leaves an aching point.

3. ‘My’ Will

What does it mean when something is inevitable?

One type of the inevitable is the irrevocable state. A word said, a contract signed, a gift given cannot be taken back, undone. The will let loose in the first act continues to exist, indeed extorts its separate existence from the empirical character (Dasein) who considers this will his own. After any given act of will there are at least two manifestations of that will – the originating party (Dasein) and all the effects of will, which comprise a sub- or supra-Dasein. The unwilled will ‘effect’ or ‘astral’ Dasein continues to strive detached from its original body – irregardless of any ‘change’ of will at the source or any other new or subsequent acts of will subtracting from the thrust of the first act. Far from it to shrivel up and die for lack of life spirits (as clinging vines do when cut off from their roots), it is the disembodied will, which can be said to be inevitable. A career of the detached will and its ultimate tragedy can be studied in Shakespeare’s King Lear. When you divest yourself of your will, you usually end up being divested of your life by your disembodied will. Proof of the innate disloyalty of will is the ease with which one’s ‘own’ will can turn on one in allegiance with heretofore hostile forces. Disloyalty or infidelity is the natural state – like the force of gravity – or clinamen – an act of will is an atom of intentionality propelled by drive, once out in the universe it has no organ of recognition orienting it ‘back’ to its point of departure. The astral will is lawless, rudderless, utterly promiscuous and stops only when its amoral energy is depleted.

The changeability of the will demonstrates nothing so much as that one’s will never belonged to one in the first place, it belongs in the true sense to no one, not even to those hostile forces. It resides in them as accidentally and as perversely as it once did in oneself.

In later writings, Nietzsche seems to have abandoned his automatic references to power or force as will – in favour of an abstract effect of force in time and space. He develops a theory of “Zeitatomistik” (time-atomism) in a fragment from Spring 1873, in which he defines force as only a “Funktion der Zeit” (function of time). The force itself lies in the degree of acceleration or retardation. He tries to resolve age old disputes about movement and Parmenidean static unchanging force in time and space. Time is seen as time-space where force needs both in order to exist or manifest itself. Marx’s idea of circulation posits a movement which is neither pure time nor space – as it does not move in the usual sense of covering distance or being actio in distans, and yet it too as a force is a “Funktion der Zeit”, measured in its acceleration and deceleration between “time-points” at varying distances from one another. The closer the points are to one another the faster and greater the force of circulation. (see Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Frühjahr 1873 26[12] in Kritische Studienausgabe, herausgegeben von Giorigio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Bd 2227, p. 578)

Sometimes it is very useful not to do anything. Nietzsche has a curious way of mocking action in “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft” (The Gay Science) despite his idée fixe of the will or the act as will-to-power. How does that fit together? This mocking of action is implied by scattered remarks in reference to Boscovich and Nietzsche’s rudimentary “Zeitatomistik” (time-atomism) such as:
“no matter (Boscovich)
no will
no thing in itself
no aim”

(“kein Stoff (Boscovich)
kein Wille
kein Ding an Sich
kein Zweck”
Nietzsche, Sommer-Herbst 1884 26 [302] in Kritische Studienausgabe, herausgegeben von Giorigio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Bd 2231, p. 231)

They all must be inseparable concepts for Nietzsche – you can’t have one without being obliged to the rest. A will has a direction – a goal – for Schopenhauer it is the Ding an Sich, and without matter it loses its aspect of being a power to form/shape (gestaltende Kraft). The act is still part of vita contemplativa – nothing is further from usefulness for society than Nietzsche’s idea of action. Everything considered by society to be a means (zweckmäßig) with or without ends is despicable for him. That is the view of the herd, the “struggle for existence”. Oddly the proponents of this struggle – “der liebe Spencer et hoc genus omne” (“dear Spencer et hoc genus omne”) –reckon the “voluntary donation of urine” amongst expressions of altruism. (Nietzsche, op. cit., 26 [303])

So why do we still speak of ‘my’ will or categorically assert, “I want”? To use a trite example – a will is a self-piloting bus or streetcar into which groups of individuals enter, although they each regard themselves as the sole occupant or passenger. Having reached their destination, they exit the will, expecting its journey likewise to be at an end. But the will’s bus route is endless and timeless, hence the utter hopelessness of trying to possess it. In reality it is the master of stopping at the station and going on at the same time. One can avoid the extremities of risk and disaster by never trusting one’s will to do what one wants, never confide in it or only those things one desires publicized in the whole world or about whose disclosure, divulgence or leakage one is perfectly indifferent.

Infinite Coup - Notes on the Egyptian Revolution

2011-02-22T22:49:00.000-08:00

1. Unknowing (Non-Savoir)
2. The Tao of Deception
3. Power of Degeneracy
4. Time of Tyrants
5. Badiou’s Infinite State
6. Bonapartism or Pétainist Transcendental?

1. Unknowing (Non-Savoir)

There are many forms of unknowing – as many if not more than those of un-being. One state of not knowing is that of never knowing – that which ‘induces’ this never knowing is unknowable (dare one say ‘object’), but perhaps only from the state of a particular unknowing. The state of unknowing may also conceivably be one preceding all (any) knowing.
The “cloud of unknowing” is a semi-permanent darkness which merely borrows the ‘relation of no relation’ of unknowing to mark a state in which knowledge is unattainable – even undesirable. This state cannot be transcended or altered in any way. It is permanent unknowing. Mystical states of beatitude or relations not based on knowledge are typical examples of such unknowing. Knowledge is used to hold back knowledge similar to instances of will used to hinder will – as an intra-monadic action.

Unknowing in the sublunary literary cosmogony of relations refers to the strange but very common occurrence – when something known becomes unknown. It is the reverse of mystical unknowing – yet potentially more disturbing – because accompanied by unspecific loss. One had been familiar with something or someone – a person, a place, a thing – that person, place or thing becomes unfamiliar, strange. One had been connected by knowing, perhaps without even noticing it - if this knowing was habit or ‘second nature’ – but suddenly one is disconnected. Knowing reverts back to unknowing. The ‘present’ unknowing could be a kind of temporary lapse, an amnesia, or a second new kind of unknowing. When you don’t recognize someone you know, you’ve forgotten that you know them, this is the ordinary experience of unknowing. An old woman at the wake of her husband wonders if she ever ‘knew’ him – knew in the biblical sense – “Did I have sexual intercourse with him?”.

The second type of unknowing is similar to second innocence – harder to lose than the first innocence. One knows nothing – one is unknowing – this unknowing is agitated by a first knowing – one leaves the state of naiveté – the step from the first unknowing to knowing is irreversible. One is astonished at how everything is changed and one cannot even imagine how it was to have been so unknowing. From the point of knowing - unknowing becomes the “first fine careless rapture, which can never be recaptured”. This first unknowing casts that of which one is unknowing as the unknown – once this shell of the unknown is cracked or perforated it can never be repaired – it is irreparable – knowledge or knowing is a kind of damage done to unknowing. The perfection of unknowing has been forever marred by the imperfection (and incompleteness) of knowing – this imperfection could also be called the ‘original sin’ of unknowing – the source of all insincerity.
Although this kind of irreparable move from unknowing to knowing seems to hold only of other knowing or unknowing subjects – the inorganic unknown or animal unknown do not radiate (emanate) this fatal irreversibility. Only when the unknowing is of another unknowing subject whose move to knowing may or may not emulate (mimic) one’s own can any sort of irreversibility (irreparability) of this move be contemplated.

But sometimes the first knowing can be undone – when one ‘unknows’ someone – they become unfamiliar. One sees them again with the eyes of a stranger, although they themselves see nothing different. You the second unknower or unknower to the second degree have become the stranger. This means you look again with unknowing eyes on what you had previously looked with knowing eyes. In the sense that knowledge is a kind of servility of consciousness - exercising its power of knowing for the purposes of serving some kind of recognition – unknowing is sovereignty – or the ‘miraculous’ subject. “I define unalloyed sovereignty as the miraculous reign of unknowing.” (Georges Bataille, “Sovereignty”, The Bataille Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Oxford, 1997, p. 312 note 3)

You unknow yourself in the new body of drill – the new body of the ballerina, the soldier, the terrorist, the castrato. You sacrifice yourself to the Other who is you – like Odin – I to myself. “Zucht und smart-sein” (drill and being-smart). In the accident “nothing gives place to the unknowable of the moment” (Bataille, op. cit., p. 312) – but one anticipates the value of drill for the accident – just as drill or discipline are not dissociable from Wittgenstein’s ‘random’ method of philosophical investigation. To be ‘smart’ is not just a question of the uniform, but especially of what is underneath it. Does one have to have heard anything about Sparta to conduct oneself as a Spartan? Would it not be better to know nothing of Sparta. Discipline is an unknowing of the absence of discipline. Self-preservation of knowing is at the heart of the Enlightenment – sacrifice of knowing is at the root of the ‘community’ (without community). How does the one become the other? You unknow yourself in the community or community is an active non-knowledge (non-savoir) of yourself. As Bataille warns: “Il n’est loisible à quiconque de ne pas appartenir à mon absence de communauté.” [“No one is free not to participate in my absence of community.” From “Prendre ou Laissez” 1946 (?) quoted in “Georges Bataille: incarnation, destruction, et absence de la communauté”, Lyon, Horlieu, 1999 (supplement au n°9 de la Lettre Horlieu) Note: Thanks to Greg Yudin (Moscow School of Higher Economics) who brought this principal thought of Bataille to my attention.]

The second unknowing is much more permanent – it can neither go back to a first knowing nor forward to a second knowing. This is a state one wants to achieve. Hence it is innocence, which cannot be lost. All of this could have some implications for the Heideggerian notion of the “unthought” in or of a philosophy. The unthought of a philosopher. Unthinking can mean without thought – or prior to thought. Like in unknowing. A kind of innocence of thought. Thought before it is thought is unthinking. Heidegger seems to mean – the part of a philosophy, which is permanently unthought – the dark unpresentable side of thought – the formless ground in which thought is ungrounded. But unthinking can also mean the reversing of thinking. A thought, which had been thought, unravels (itself) into unthought. This would be the second unthinking. Such unravelling is more of the nature of entropy than innocence. Given that philosophy (in a Heideggerian sense) ‘originates’ in the formless ungrounded ground of unthought – every thought (philosophy) could be said to have an innate ‘death drive’ of its own – to return to this state of total equilibrium of the unthought. It would be the aim of a critique of philosophy to unthink its thought – to reflect on the question “what is unthinking” – to propel its thinking into unthinking or to show how its thinking is already an unthinking. (Unfortunately this already sounds like a kind of counter ‘Destruktion’ or deconstruction – but one has to resist the automatic sirens of unthinking.)

Axiom: Every thought, which has been thought, can be equally unthought.

If what Ernst Bloch says is true – that every philosopher has one thought – (and why shouldn’t it be true being the paraphrase or imitation of all those other onenesses – every writer has one story, every composer one song etc.) – then potentially by unthinking that one thought one could unthink that philosopher too.

One is also unknowing when one thinks one knows but doesn’t. This is particularly dangerous – the state of thinking one knows when one doesn’t is typical of a person with a sense of false security. The philosophical stance – to know that one knows nothing is to be in a perpetual state of being on guard, to resist any quietude imposed by a sense of security. To shun such knowing. To always strive for the aporetic.

Oddly those in power although perhaps obsessed with their security or with the uninterrupted prolongation of their power – are not immune to such a sense of false security. The paranoia of the tyrant (Gewaltherrscher) is the other side of his ostentatious representation and colossal ‘public’ works. The infamous tyrant Giangaleazzo in 14th century Milan undertook massive dam constructions costing 300,000 Goldgulden on the Mincio of Mantua, the Brenta of Padua, so as to be able to divert these rivers at will, leaving those cities without a defence.

An odd analogy exists between the philosophical stance of unknowing and the permanent watchfulness and distrust of the absolute ruler – the ruler of the state of exception. As Burckhardt remarks about the tyrants of Renaissance Italy – their states (lo stato) were founded on illegitimacy rather than on a “mystic foundation” (Montaigne) of law. Although Montaigne qualifies this “mystic foundation” as being a necessary “fiction” of authority and
devoid of justice. “Now laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws.” (Montaigne, “Of Experience”, Book III, 13, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, Stanford, 1965, p. 821) The laws are also “grossly and widely and ordinarily faulty” (ibid.) making them into sacred things. Sacred things tend to be defective, badly made, because the sacred is not useful, it is not work. The proof of the mystic foundation of the authority of law is their faultiness – if they were just or equitable in themselves, men would obey them for their own sake and not for their mystic foundation. So “in spite of everything, the sacred thing ends up having utility.” (Bataille, op. cit., p. 314)

In the tyrant state all relations within the entourage and family (often the same) are equally illegitimate – or based on unknowing of the fidelity of such a relation. In a state of illegitimacy no loyalty could be nor was expected. The only ‘rational’ behavior was one of constant distrust and elaborate precaution against betrayal and assassination. Any act of loyalty to the ruler on the other hand could be seen as a microcosmic legitimation of the state. The briefly serving vice-president of Egypt Omar Soleiman is portrayed as someone who once saved the life of the then President Mubarak – this is especially remarkable not just as an act of personal fidelity – but in the sense of the “two bodies of the king” – by ‘saving the life’ of the president he had also legitimated this specific rule or state of exception. The act itself was the logistical decision to ship Mubarak’s armoured Mercedes with him on a state visit to Addis Ababa during which an attempt on his life occurred – not a personal act of bravery or sacrifice on the part of Soleiman. But in the history of the reign of Mubarak – similar to the absolute states in the past – even such a bureaucratic decision was coated in glory – being itself an exceptional act of fidelity in a state based on infidelity and illegitimacy.

2. The Tao of Deception

No organized retreat. Just organized remaining. Unchanged. Sometimes one can retreat into a more rather than less dangerous terrain. Especially if the enemy is scattered all over and the theatre of war is circular. The inevitable distance sets in, what seemed to draw close was actually a pulling away.

How much does the rule – ‘war is the Tao of deception’ apply to the afterlife (of war). The afterlife does not remove the constraints of life; it increases them and gives them a new tensility. The old rules about when to lie and when to tell the truth assumed that one knew the world outside and one knew one’s own mind accurately. But if one operates under a premise of unknowability and unpredictability this ceases to be the case. Believing, the other side of lying and truth telling is similarly indeterminate. One can believe to be telling the truth. Error is another state. One can be in error but truthful. Better believe oneself to be telling a lie – but in terms of the universe to be telling the truth. Truth can be an obstruction to real knowledge. Truth of revelation is not provable, so it can be dismissed at any time as a lie. A lie is more universal than a mere fact, which might be considered by ordinary judges to be true. Facts are what people usually mean when they say truth. As if a fact were so easy to obtain. The secrets Ciceron, a Turkish spy for Nazi Germany, sold were not facts, they were threats – even if they described real invasion plans of the Allies. He was the untruthful simpleton who served to deepen the German phantasy of being beyond defeat – already a sign of the euphoria of defeat. Speer uses the words “euphoric ideas” in his book about his “conflicts with the SS” - “Der Sklaven-Staat” (The Slave State). The SS was a ‘euphoria engine’.

When one is happy together with someone else, does this mean that each person possesses his own happiness or that x parts of happiness (in the case of x number of people) formed one whole happiness? The same question could be asked about the “will of the people” – “la volonté générale” (Rousseau) – out of which one whole state is reputedly formed?

In a remark in the Encyclopaedia expounding upon the notion of the one and the many in atomistic philosophy, Hegel fractures Rousseau’s idea of “la volonté générale”. Each one is a one and one of many, so the one and the many are one and the same. Each one though is also a negative relation to itself – one of exclusion or repulsion. It repels itself from itself, which is another way of saying it is attracted to the other ones – all like itself. So the excluding relation of the one to itself – its ‘for-itself’ sublates itself (hebt sich auf). Hence Hegel can conclude, following an atomistic view of “the political”, “more important lately than the atomistic view of the physical”, that “the will of the singular as such is the principle of the state” – here seeming to allude to ‘lo stato’ of the tyrant – yet the “general, the state itself, is the external relation of the contract.” (Enzyclopedia der philosophischen Wissenschaften I, G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden 8, Frankfurt, 1970, p. 207) He has dissected Rousseau’s “general will” into the “will of the singular” (the one of the many ones) and “the general” which is the state itself, the contract exterior to the will of the one. Hegel’s state is a hybrid of the absolute state of the tyrant and the Enlightenment concept of the state as social contract.

But as the principle “überhaupt” (above all) of atomistic philosophy is “the for-itself in the figure (Gestalt) of the many” – the many or the people are inherent in the “will of the singular”. (ibid.)

The undecidability of the one or the many as the foundation of the state appears to be resolved in this essential principle of atomistic philosophy.

3. The Power of Degeneracy

Heidegger considers Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to be the ‘teacher of the overcoming of the spirit of revenge’ – by way of the eternal return of the same. But isn’t it quite the opposite? The spirit of revenge is the aversion of the will (being of Being is will) to time – or the ‘it was’ of time. The return of the same overcomes ‘it was’. Could Nietzsche mean though the return of the same in the world or history or the cosmos – or in thought itself – which in its recurrence ‘materializes’ itself in world, history, cosmos? The Egyptian revolution of today is haunted by many recurrences of the same collective thought – on “The Friday of Farewell”, itself a repetition of the “Friday of Departure” – protestors in Alexandria are marching to the (presidential) Ras Al Tin palace where King Farouk stepped his final steps as king before being ousted by the 1952 officer’s coup led by Nasser. They obviously hope for a recurrence of such a coup. Note: A few hours later Mubarak stepped down and the military took charge. Did the march to the scene of the first toppling conjure up the ‘return of the same’ finally? A revolution is the apotheosis of the return of the same – at least it manifests a circular logic – of revenge. Something which was the ‘state’ ceases to be so abruptly – as if a circle has completed itself at a strict point.

Soleiman delivered the final speech of the regime, in which Mubarak’s resignation was announced and power transferred to the army, in approximately 20 seconds. This was the exact point or moment of the revolution and at the same time a ‘silent coup’. Tariq Ali named it a “coup against the dictator” – but was it really that? An abbreviated sort of revolutionary dialectic seems to be at work - the Egyptian revolution erupted simultaneously with its own counter-revolution. (Interestingly, the disappeared police are now back on the streets in uniform – but as “protestors” in their own right, claiming they are also victims of the regime.) Counter-revolution is not just the reverse or mirror image of the revolution. It is a movement in itself – positivity without negativity. In this case, counter-revolution is the positivity of martial law, which is not a state of exception. Or can the object ruled by martial law be considered a state or sovereign?
In the Egyptian Revolution/Coup one can detect at least two versions of the ‘one and the many’. The One of the People who united almost physically in their masses to transfer (convey) their will to the state (perhaps not quite willingly) and the Many of the multitude who cannot be One and resist this transfer of will. By seemingly acceding to the “will of the people” unified in that one artificial construct of a “general will” (“Communiqué 1: all the people’s demands will be met”), the army for the moment seems to have been able to decapitate the revolution with one ‘coup’. The “will of the people” has become the army’s effigy.

The One of the “will of the people” and the amorphous multitude form a “zone of indistinction” between them – where neither people nor multitude prevails. Virno in his “Grammar of the Multitude” cites the medieval jus resistentiae – as characteristic of the pre-state multitude associated in a variety of corporations – who resist encroachments of the law of the realm on their particular ‘bodies’. A tragedy of such an idée fixe of jus resistentiae is unfolded in Kleist’s “Michael Kolhhaas”. Virno sees the contemporary multitude (following Spinoza and not Hobbes) as preserving and reviving a certain non-state concept of freedom found in those earlier multitudes – although in great contradistinction to the 17th century multitude, the contemporary multitude considers itself more rather than less universal than the state. (see Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multiude, Los Angeles, 2004, pp. 42-43) The universality of the multitude transcends the ‘nation-state’, corresponding, in Virno’s estimation, to the “general intellect” – a concept he derives from the chapter “Fragment on Machines” in Marx’s “Grundrisse”.

Virno identifies the multitude in the discourse of the seventeenth century in particular in Hobbes as the anti-state – this anti-state is in contrast to the people who are the necessary and proper complement of the state. The Egyptian protest was conducted by a multitude in the process of becoming a people of the ‘coming’ unknown state. The concept of ‘will of the people’ is already in Hobbes – it represents that which the people has (as its natural right) so as to transfer it to the sovereign. The multitude has no unified will – hence it is in essence ungovernable. Spinoza as Virno notes sees in the multitude the true “architrave” (armature) of civil liberties and civil society. (Virno, op. cit., pp. 22-23) The multitude is the many, the people becomes the one.

The other binary of the “One and the Many” – is the One of the Ruler/Dictator and the Many of the subjects, individuals. For Badiou, though there are no individuals in the state, they are only ‘present’ and ‘represented’ as countable singularities or singletons. The multitude or anti-state might correspond to what Badiou calls the “void”.

The eternal recurrence of the same sounds less romantic or implausible when one sees it in light of the principles of ‘accident theory’ – the accumulation of chance occurrences can lead over a period of time to amazing recurrent patterns. Conversely – one minute flaw in a regular sequence can result in a catastrophic accident.
The recurrence of the same thought or thoughts is another way of overcoming one’s own time - this is not the same as memory, but the persistence for unknown reasons of certain irreducible and permanent thoughts – which keep returning without volition – such as the ‘power of degeneracy’. Thinking of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker I had thought I had discovered something ‘new’ – that it was a fable of degeneracy from the perspective of a scepticism towards all human economies. His images radiate a great ‘power of degeneracy’ using an old telephone which surprisingly rings, decaying railroad tracks, decrepit industrial barracks beyond all modernity, swampy caves in a depopulated rural hinterland and a lumpy crowded bed. But already some years ago I had been observing phenomena in the ‘valley’ – which I compared with the Zone in Stalker – “not just the characters (degeneracy) but the physical surroundings with their outré sense of the ordinary: “We saw an utterly bright immobile light in the eastern sky over the river. Then it disappeared and came again. It could have been an extraterrestrial visitor – all things are possible in our valley.” The only ‘new’ thought is that the power of degeneracy is also the “will to power”.

Over the years the same thought faded only to reappear with slight revisions and deflections – first as degeneracy, then power of degeneracy then will to power – of degeneracy. One could ask if every power is a ‘will to power’ – as in the power of degeneracy. There is a fact of power– the power of degeneracy to promote degeneration – Verfall. But is it a will to power? Perhaps it is. Bloch speaks of a “Rausch des Unglücks” (drunkenness of unhappiness). Benjamin says in Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street) decline, degeneration is no more astonishing or less stable than ascendance (progress). The groundless presumption, once one is settled in the stability of decline – is to imagine a rescue from this solid well-established degeneracy. The anticipated miraculous rescue is often the ripening catastrophe. In this sense – stability is inertia (entropy) – it can only be interrupted or altered or transformed by something extraordinary (not change as incremental progress) – this is the rescue. (Hölderlin – “wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch” – “where danger is, the rescue also grows”) Only in the stability of decline does that extraordinary other grow – the catastrophe. Nazism was both for the Germans – rescue and catastrophe. One can see Benjamin’s writings about messianism or the messianic, as writing in anticipation of a catastrophe-rescue from the stability of a degenerate progression.

4. Time of Tyrants

The time of the tyrant is dead time – even for the tyrant. Or it is suspended time – the suspension of the law in the form of emergency laws. For the people it is a time of waiting – for the end of the tyrant and his tyranny. In a note in Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcade Project) Benjamin asks himself – how to remove the blemish of waiting from the ‘messianic’. In the case of the tyrant – the ending of tyranny is the messianic anticipation (expectation), for the people, who wait for it every day. Just as in the case of all messianic expectations – it could potentially come at any minute and through any door. This is the excitement of the uncertain arrival of the end. Such excitement is the only true frisson one can experience in the time of tyranny. In a life without pleasure (which is the state of tyranny) the end of the tyranny is the only pleasure of pleasure.
One knows that there will be a violent end – because just as the tyrant begins his rule illegitimately – he cannot end it other than illegitimately – in other words he has no succession. Mubarak when resigning did not observe the constitutional procedure of a written submission to parliament, after which power should be transferred to the Speaker of parliament – so even his resignation itself is technically illegal. In tyrannies succession was always rare, even in antiquity – the passing on of the rule of Syria from the father Hafez-al-Assad to his son Bashar-al-Assad – could be seen as the exception in this present generation of absolute rulers. Perhaps for the tyrant – the most difficult aspect of his tyranny is its ending – the period of tyranny has no natural conclusion – it has an indefinite mythical duration – as in the 1000 year Reich. From the moment it begins it must search for its mode of retreat – this absence weighs not only on the people, it weighs equally on the tyrant. For although it may be true – that the sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception – or rather when it begins – he is not the one who decides when it ends. That decision is always beyond the limit of the tyrant’s time – it is a decision, which approaches him from a time beyond himself – as if he were seeing life from the perspective of his own demise or afterlife. The time of the tyrant is an exceptional time, which cannot initiate or conceive its own ending.

An Egyptian human rights activist in London scoffed, in an interview on Al Jazeera, at the planes flying over Tahrir Square. “Does he want to establish an occupation of Egypt?” The activist also said the ruling class when it loses power goes mad – it is living in a parallel reality. But this parallel reality is exactly the state of exception. It is for the tyrant and his entourage, his retainers a time without end – hence they can only live in its endless reality. The time of the Führer-Bunker was a similar endless, never-ending time. The protestors want to end the state of exception – they want a ‘normal’ state – but they have occupied a ‘state of madness’ – Mubarak’s state – so long (thirty years) that he cannot be convinced that this state can no longer hold them. The protestors impose their own state of non-exception as the antinomy of the tyrant’s state of exception. Their state of non-exception though appears to be a non-state of exception in relation to the tyrant’s state of exception. Hence for him his state of exception represents stability – whereas their non-state of exception is chaos. Quite logically – for the protestors the reverse is the case. One of the protestors frequent chants is simply “Hosni Mubarak – batal” – “Hosni Mubarak – invalid”.

A placard presents the demand – what you did not do in thirty years, you won’t manage in three months – leave. The placard’s text reminds the tyrant – he has lost track of time. His reign must end like the Faustian bargain – eventually but right on time Mephistopheles (the army? the army’s backers?) appears and tells Faust “time’s up” (game over). The time of tyranny is always endless – but it must always end abruptly. Or rather it begins to end – the moment it begins its illegitimate visitation upon a population. The actual ending is often counted in days – such as the “ten days that shook the world”. Each moment of these days of ending – has a temporal density far higher than the preceding years of tyranny. This is a law of revolution – time is not suspended as in the state of exception – time is raised to a higher power – a kind of temporal escape velocity – to rush an immobile presence, the paralyzed unrest embodied in the tyrant and his ‘mob’ of beneficiaries (security forces and business – local and global) off the historical stage. The brevity of the time of collapse of such a regime is also a kind of law. It represents an acceleration of events driven forward doubly by the protestors’ actions and the usual and extraordinary acts of suppression by a power itself already in a negative depleted mode. The aggregate of power has been subsisting in an ‘afterlife’ for a long period before the ‘final push’ begins – the remnant of power at the end of a state must cannibalize itself to continue to project a phantasmagorical vitality. Or – the power remaining in the state is only sufficient to accelerate the obliteration (disappearance) of its own phantasmal substance.

A man amongst the crowd of Egyptian protestors said – “Thirty goddamned years he ruled.” But one wonders if at the beginning of the thirty years one would have spoken like that. “One year he ruled.” does not convey the same kind of burden or pharaonic yoke. The thirty years weigh most heavily at the end – it is the end weight (critical mass) which counts. Or the first year of the thirty years (from the point of view of the end) seems as tiresome and oppressive as the thirtieth year – the time of overflowing rejection. All years seem like the thirtieth year at the end. Benjamin’s observation about the clocks during the time of the July Revolution (1830) seems to refute this principle of revolutionary time – he notes that on the first day of the battle revolutionaries in various parts of Paris independently of one another shot at the clock towers so as to freeze the time of the revolt. It is rather the time of tyranny which is frozen – time unthaws, becomes a living time again only during the revolt against the dead time of the tyrant.

Besides the years of the tyrant, the days of the revolution, there is also another time, which echoes incessantly in the demands of the protestors – now. Mubarak – leave now, step down now. Even Obama could not resist using the ‘messianic’ word – now. The orderly transition to democracy should start now. One hears in that ‘now’ what Benjamin calls – “Jetztzeit” – Now-Time. In the bipolar ‘algebra of revolution’ though the sign (symbol) ‘now’ also stands for ‘never’.

Omar Soleiman threatened the protestors with “dialogue or coup” (like the lady or the tiger?) – but how could a coup have a coup?

5. Badiou’s Infinite State

Contemporary philosophy is hypnotized by the power of the state – although this fascination tends to veil itself in a preoccupation with militancy and revolution. Agamben makes this most explicit in his introduction to Homo Sacer - “Today, now that the great State structures have entered into a process of dissolution and the emergency has, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, become the rule, the time is ripe to place the originary structure and limits of the form of the state in a new perspective. The weakness of anarchist and Marxian critiques of the State was precisely to have not caught sight of this structure and thus to have quickly left the arcanum imperii, as if it had no substance outside of the simulacra and the ideologies invoked to justify it. But one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand, and the theory of the State (and in particular the state of exception (…) ) is the reef on which the revolutions of our century have been shipwrecked.” (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford, 1998, p. 12)

Axiom: Communiqués are like axioms, Badiou’s favored mode of thought. ‘Proving’ Deleuze’s and Guattari’s own axiom - “the great axiomaticians are men of State (…)” (A Thousand Plateaus).

Rather than considering the moribund state as a ‘negative power’, Badiou sees the power of what he calls the rioters in Tunisia to bring a regime to its collapse as itself the “negative power”. “Its negative power is recognized, a lamentable power that vanishes fully into its own image.” (see Daniel Fischer’s transcription of Badiou’s seminar “What does “change the world” mean?”, from January 19th 2011, online at wrong+arithmetic, Alain Badiou on Tunisia, riots and revolution, February 2, 2o11) Still, one must regard this vanishing power with sympathy (empathy) – because it shows that what appears “unfailing stable” can collapse (“all that is solid melts into air”). That is its “minimal lesson”. The paradox implicit in his analysis – what Badiou cannot explain is why that lamentable vanishing negative power is precisely that, which can cause that whose appearance is “unfailing stable” to collapse – thus “changing the world”. Why is changing the world then ‘minimal’? Badiou seems unable to conceive of a revolution in the time of its occurrence – he describes our time as “intervallic” – between distinctive historical epochs. Now is a time of riots. He diminishes the status of the Tunisian protestor to a “rioter” – because the rioter does not present himself as an “alternative to the State” – which the revolutionary organized in his Party invariably does. As if a revolution were merely the orderly transition from one state and party to the next – and not (in principle) the total destruction or at least interruption and as such change of what is. The state of which he speaks is always the “ontological” state – in itself a non-volatile count. A revolution, for Badiou, is only that which can immediately ‘substitute’ a ready-formed immobile set of subsets for the existing defunct one. He sees the revolutionary overthrow of a state as analogous to following a mathematical rule or series.
Here Badiou lapses into a fallacy Wittgenstein criticized as a myth of continuity, a sort of utopia of the infinite and seamless following of a rule – reflected in everyday practices as well as in the application of mathematical rules.

Badiou cannot help judge the events in Tunisia as “illegal” – from the point of view of the situation of the state, his major ontological category. “A vague uneasiness makes itself felt in the requisitely contented character, let’s call it consensual character, that must be displayed in spite of the inherent illegality of the events concerned.” (ibid.) (“(…)en dépit d’illegalité fonciere des événements concernés.”)

Perhaps the “unfailing stable” which has collapsed – is not just the empirical regime in Tunisia or Egypt – but the ‘western’ paradigm of the “mafia-esque dictatorship” (see Toni Negri: Letter to a Tunisian Friend, February 14, 2011, http://multitudes.samizdat.net/) as a katechon – ostensibly “the bulwark” against the threat of Islamism. Although this katechonic legitimacy of tyrant states (proxy despots) – is itself dependent upon the veracity of such a threat – the sheer unbearability of these katechonic states unleashed another sort of Antichrist (rather than holding back its dominion) – the popular uprisings leading to their own collapse. When the U.S. Secretary of State Clinton, in a kind of autosuggestive stupor, urges the governments of the region facing the revolts, for instance the government in Bahrain (home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet) or in Libya to use “restraint” – she unconsciously summons the figure of the katechon, the restrainer of chaos and lawless ones – the failing golem of U.S. and ‘western’ foreign and military policy in the Middle East.

Paraphrasing Marx’s distinction in the 1844 Manuscripts –it is only necessary to think the thought of communism to overthrow the thought of capitalism– though of course not enough for the same in reality. In Badiou’s thought it is impossible to even think a revolution. His ontology of the state precludes the thought of revolution or any other kind of ‘interruption’ of the state. How could the negativity of the evental rupture be ‘recognized’ by the positive state? First of all, the event has no structure and by definition “lacks being” – meaning it does not exist in the “situation”. An event must undergo a torturous examination by a lethargic secretive “state” bureaucracy with no certainty of ever qualifying for the status of event. (Typically, he asks of the Tunisian ‘rioters’ – what do they affirm?) The event stands ‘before the law’ with little hope of ever entering.
Badiou’s philosophy is predestined to be part of what Jacques Ranciere names “the intellectual counter-revolution” (in the public discussion: “Importance of Critical Theory for Social Movements Today, February 1, 2011, YouTube), because his ontological premise is that of the state – the historical-political ‘nation-state’, the “figure of being” he finds admittedly indispensable to insure the “count”.

He is a statist in ontology – the state is simply “what is”. “In the ontology of historical multiplicities I have proposed, the State, qua the state of a situation, is what ensures the structural count of a situation’s parts, a count of the situation that generally bears the proper name of a particular ‘nation’. To call such a state, that is such an operation of counting, a State ‘of right’, basically means (…)the rule of counting (…)” (Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Politics” in Conditions, London, 2008, p. 167)
Badiou criticized Althusser for “suturing” philosophy directly to politics – as “class struggle in theory”. (see “Philosophy and Politics” op. cit., p. 160) But hasn’t Badiou also sutured ontology to politics by designating the historical state as identical with the ontological state – the bracket, frame he uses to decide or leave undecided the nature of an ‘event’, its discernibility or indiscernibility? Badiou can seem to leave politics as it is by surreptitiously ontologizing it – not as politics itself but as a quasi ‘non-political’ state. Politics though means state – not anti-state movement – or if a movement then only the movement of the state, bringing politics very close to fascism. As Agamben says, echoing Adorno – we are still under the sign of fascism/Nazism.

In any situation the state determines the three sorts of “one-terms”, meaning the degree of inclusion or belonging in the state. If something is presented but not included in the state it is singular, if both presented (belongs) and represented (included) it is normal, if represented and not presented it is deemed excrescent. These three one-terms depend solely upon the state for their recognition or existence (the state confers the seal of the one) – besides “they are the most primitive concepts of any experience whatsoever.” (Alain Badiou, Being and Event, London, 2007, p. 100) In other words, the state is all there is.

What state will ever decide to include its own destruction? Badiou’s ‘ontological state’ immunizes itself against resistance, it is a state of immunity. The state is the presentation of fullness or plenitude. The anti-state interruptions are invisible, inexistent, indiscernible. Dialectic has been discarded – as Badiou says, there is no becoming, hence no negativity. The ‘romantic’ distance is the irreparable breach between singleton and state. The state is tautological, the contract between self and self – the Ich=Ich of German idealism. The state is the state because it excludes the presentation of the void – this is also what makes it necessary. “The state secures and completes the plenitude of the situation.” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 522)

Badiou prescribes impossible conditions for ‘deciding’ if an “intervention” will have been an event – always only in the future anterior tense. For an event to have taken place (or to become established as such in the state or situation of the state) – a sort of phantom prior-event must have already taken place – a deferred pre-condition. But as an event is only something, which is new and undecided, its pre-event disqualifies it permanently from ever having been an event. “It is evental recurrence which founds intervention. In other words, there is no interventional capacity, constitutive for the belonging of an evental multiple to a situation, save within the network of consequences of a previously decided belonging. An intervention is what presents an event for the occurrence of another.” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 209)

Despite his often-repeated slogan “The truth is first of all something new” – an event can never be new – there is only as Badiou says “evental recurrence” – sounding almost Nietzschean. Any idea of a “radical beginning” or a “primal event” he dismisses as “speculative leftism”. A radical beginning would be in Badiou’s system something wild and ‘unsubmitted’ to the order of the situation alias state – it is a false and violent thought of an “ultra-one of the event, Revolution or Apocalypse”. But the event shrinks still further towards insignificance/unreality – even as recurrence its occurrence is negligible – it must have already been to be at all – it is existent only “after the fact” in its “consequences”, a mode of being Badiou calls “being-faithful”. (see chapter on “The Intervention” in Alain Badiou, Being and Event, London, 2007, p. 210)

Just as Badiou refers to the Tunisian events as “illegal” – so the intervention whose status vis-à-vis the state must remain undecided – is first of all also “illegal”.

Badiou admits that this is a “circle”, part of the “long critical trial of the reality of action” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 209). These are almost magical conditions – such as those presaged by the witches to Macbeth. Macbeth will fall only when Birnam Woods moves to Dunsinane Hill, though none of woman born can harm him and beware of Macduff. Perhaps the contagion of uprisings in our time – does follow this logic: the moving of Birnam Woods is like Badiou’s ‘roaming void’ of the ‘rioters’, unborn but lurking in the ontology of the state. Macduffs seem to be plentiful.

The undecidable event of the Tunisian ‘riots’ was the impossible unexpected pre-event for the fall of Mubarak in the Egyptian Revolution.

One wonders why Badiou, who casts himself as a thinker of the revolution, should so require the state for the securing of his ontology. Why is the state so indispensable a category? Peter Hallward hints at this dilemma at the end of a review of the second volume of “Being and Event” – “Logics of Worlds”.
“In Being and Event he developed an ontology which accepted the state as an irreducible dimension of being itself: consistency is imposed at both the structural and ‘meta-structural’ levels of a situation, and a truth evades but cannot eliminate the authority of the state.” (Peter Hallward, “Order and Event” On Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, New Left Review 53, Sept Oct 2008 p. 121, pdf, online at wrong+arithmetic, Alain Badiou on Tunisia, riots and revolution, February 2, 2011)
Hallward notes this complicity of state and being for Badiou’s ontology – but he does not give any reason for it. Badiou himself is quite frank about the function and necessity of the state: “It is by means of the state that structured presentation is furnished with a fictional being; the latter banishes, or so it appears, the peril of the void, and establishes the reign, since completeness is numbered, of the universal security of the one.” (Being and Event, op. cit.,

p. 98) Quite clearly, Badiou’s ontological state is also a security state, one in which coercion is a quasi-natural action of structure.

The state is so construed by Badiou – his whole artifice – as he says – to determine and act the criteria for inclusion and belonging in the set of multiples which count as one. But such a multiple of multiples is haunted by something, which constantly endangers its consistency, but is equally unavoidable. This something is as potently dangerous and constitutive for Badiou’s state as is anxiety (Angst) for Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein. The void in Badiou’s construction is the equivalent of Heidegger’s Sorge, “the care of Being”. “What Heidegger names the care of being, which is the ecstasy of beings, could also be termed the situational anxiety of the void, or the necessity of warding off the void.” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 93)

The unpresented and unrepresented of the state – is its fatal (congenital) flaw. The quasi-unborn of the state is the void. (Note: The idea of the “unborn” is from Arthur Bradley, “Politics of the Unborn: Unbearable Life from Augustine to Schmitt” paper presented in “Force and the Worst” series, Inc, Goldsmiths, 15th February 2011) At the same time – the state is a guarantee of the void – for where could it exist if not within the state. If it were elsewhere immanence of the state would be even more severely threatened. The state is necessary to contain the void, just as the void is an inevitable breach or gap haunting the multiplicity of the state. The state is quite simply Being – and that must be preserved at all costs. But the state is even more ensnared and precarious – as the Being of being is the void. The utmost danger is that the void become fixated or fix itself. To prevent that happening - above structure is another structure or meta-structure (the state) whose sole function is the un-localizing of the void. The void is an inner limit of being within the meta-structure of the state – its own infernal region which Badiou calls “subjacent to chaos” or a “spectre to be exorcised”. When one considers that precisely this void is where if anywhere a revolutionary event would be likely to arise – one can hardly imagine that Badiou’s thought edifice can conceive of the fragility of state-power. The void qua event of revolution not only ruins the historical-political state in Badiou’s thought – it is the ruin of being itself.
“Evidently the guarantee of consistency (the ‘there is Oneness’) cannot rely on structure or the count-as-one alone to circumscribe and prohibit the errancy of the void from fixing itself, and being, on the basis of this very fact, as presentation of the unpresentable, the ruin of every donation of being and the figure subjacent to Chaos.” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 93)

Agamben seizes upon Badiou’s absolutist ontology of the state – using its arguments about the event to reveal them as a precise illumination of what Agamben following Carl Schmitt calls the exception. The State (as per Badiou) or the Sovereign (more or less synonymous for Agamben) is the exception and the event – the interruption or intervention in itself. “Badiou’s thought is, from this perspective, a rigorous thought of the exception. His central category of the event corresponds to the structure of the exception.” (Homo Sacer, op. cit., p. 25) If the State is the state of the situation – the exception/event in excess of it – is the Sovereign. One sees where Agamben perhaps simplifies or vulgarizes Badiou’s idea of the event – by seeing it as “excrescent” – meaning included but not presented in the state (or represented but not presented), whereas the event for Badiou is certainly not included/represented – even if its membership is undecideable. It is neither included (not at all) nor is it a member – definitely not. But Agamben is eager to draw out a potentiality from Badiou’s scheme – one that configures the event and the Sovereign as one – under the sign of the decision (in the sense of Carl Schmitt). “This is why sovereignty presents itself in Schmitt in the form of a decision on the exception.” (ibid.) The actions of the Egyptian Military council within or as a counter movement to the Revolution – is a prototype of the Event as the Decision on the Exception. The Event according to this logic is not the Revolution, but the ‘temporary’ counter-revolution. By fixing the sovereign as the event/exception of the State – Agamben’s interpretation of Badiou’s ontology of the state as a “logic of sovereignty” is the counter-revolution in theory. Any position of subtraction of or in the State (count), is ‘always already’ occupied by the sovereign exception – a counter-revolution in permanence – to prevent the worst.

6. Bonapartism or “Pétainist Transcendental”?

There is a One and the Many within the state – Badiou’s vision of the absolute state towering from the austere heights of power over its subsets of singletons is a fiction or myth. Here Badiou seems blinded by the political-theological model of Hobbes’ Leviathan – a hierarchic monolith firmly in the grip of an absolute sovereign whose legitimacy derives from the “divine right of kings” and whose cosmic imperative is to inhibit the unbinding of itself into chaos.
The State (always capitalized) in Badiou’s system is basically infallible and non-political. He sees it, citing a ‘despairing Lenin, ready to die’ – as ‘obscenely permanent’: “(…) for the State is precisely non-political, insofar as it cannot change, save hands (…)” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 110)

Hobbes’ Leviathan itself was composed in the midst of the English Civil War and regicide; his system is based on fear, especially of the ever-present danger of the imminent dissolution of authority. The acid stringency of his rule of commonwealth reflects the deep knowledge inherited from antiquity – that all power could end abruptly. For what is any state but the temporary coalescence of power? As Seneca wrote in answer to Serenus in his treatise entitled “From the Tranquillity of the Soul”: “What kingdom is not threatened by collapse, shattering, takeover and execution? And that without any long intervals. An hour’s work: sitting on the throne and kneeling in front of it. Take note: every position is changeable (…)” (Seneca, Von der Seelenruhe, Leipzig, 1980, p. 154)

Marx has shown, in 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, his classical study of the collapse of state or the coup d’état of a post-revolutionary nation-state, how the action of the ‘One’ took 36,000,000 French citizens by surprise. Louis Napoleon, president of the French Republic at the time of his coup, could use the state to capture the state – he manipulated the inconsistencies or loopholes in the constitution regarding the exceptional role of the president, elevating it to that of emperor for himself thus bypassing those rancorous elements of the national assembly and the system of official representation. The State or the count reverted to Oneness of an absolute ruler by way of the coup. The assertion of the one-of-the-count, the presidency, over the sub-sets of parliamentary representation exploited the vestige of absolute monarchy embodied in the office of the presidency. The constitutional aporia was the basis for the coup – the coup of the One over the many within the meta-structure of the state. By an odd twist, the errancy of the void reappears in the meta-structure itself, fixing itself as a coup d’état. The coup qua void ‘restores’ or secures the One or Oneness of the state.
Non-being and Being (of the State) coincide in the coup d’état.

Varying the theme of the one and the many, the Egyptian military council, after the forced resignation of Mubarak, have taken over the One of the presidency as a collective leadership. Similar to Louis Napoleon’s circumventing of parliament – though in apparent cooperation with the demands of the people’s revolution – the supreme military council has suspended the constitution and parliament, those tainted parts perpetuating the fiction of the representation of the many. Since both constitution and parliament – as well as the cabinet which is still in power – are seen as corrupt relics of the old regime, the military rulers could appear to be acting in the name of the revolution whilst de facto carrying out what appears to be a ‘temporary’ coup.

The coup and the revolt are two opposing forms of interruption of the state, antithetical mirror images of each other. As a kind of historical symmetry, following upon the reign of Louis Napoleon begun in a coup d’état and ended in ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, came the outbreak of the popular insurrection of the Paris Commune. The coup d’état secured the one-ness of the state thus preserving being from within the meta-structure – the reign of Louis Napoleon lasted 18 years. The “non-place of the place” created by the “fixated void” (those rebellious members of Paris national guard militias and army units who refused to return their weapons and cannons) attempted to realize a communist society for the three months of the Paris Commune.
They had the aim, as Marx writes, of destroying state power and its pretence of national unity: “The unity of the nation should have become real through the destruction of that state-power, which pretended to be the embodiment of unity, but wanted to remain independent and superior to the nation, on whose body it was only a parasitic growth.” (“Die Einheit der Nation sollte (…)eine Wirklichkeit werden durch die Vernichtung jener Staatsmacht, welche sich für die Verkörperung dieser Einheit ausgab, aber unabhängig und überlegen sein wollte gegenüber der Nation, an deren Körper sie doch nur ein Schmarotzerauswuchs war.” Karl Marx, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich (The Civil War in France), in K. Marx und F. Engels, Ausgewählte Werke, Moskau, 1972, p. 303)

Which historical interruption of French state-power would Badiou’s system consider an Event – the ‘positive’ coup or the ‘negative’ revolt? Either, neither or both? Is the Event for or against Being?

In his more immediately political work – The Meaning of Sarkozy – Badiou has analyzed an enduring unconscious pattern within French political and social history of the state – which he calls France’s “Pétainist transcendental”. “I propose to say that ‘Pétainism’ is the transcendental, in France, of catastrophic forms of disorientation taken by the state. We have a major disorientation, this is presented as a turning point in the situation, and is solemnly active at the head of the state.” (Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, London, 2008, p. 78)
He depicts it as a process of legitimacy of the state, whereby the state aligns itself with history. Although he names it Pétainism, Badiou traces this pattern back to the time of the Restoration of 1815 in France. The state is the historical actor, the rescuer of the people from a moral crisis and decline originating in a disastrous event. The state of the restoration rescued the people from revolution, beheading of the king, etc; later for Pétain himself – the Nazi puppet state at Vichy was the “national revolution” against the disaster of the Popular Front; for Sarkozy, the disastrous event for which the state is the only medication was May 1968. As Badiou explains:
“There is a historical element in Pétainism that consists in linking two events: a negative event, generally with a working class and popular structure, and a positive event, with a state, electoral and/or military structure. (…) This is a source of legitimacy for the new government, since all legitimacy of this kind is a link between the state and history. The government represents itself, and has itself represented, as historical actor of the first importance, since it is this government that has finally embarked on the correction needed in the wake of the inaugural damaging event.” (Alain Badiou, op. cit., p. 84)

One can recognize in Badiou’s typology of the “Pétainist transcendental” the ‘unconscious’ model of Badiou’s own ontology of the state, his positive state of legitimacy of Being. The government or meta-structure represents itself as the One or historical actor, whose function it is to safeguard and correct Being against any intrusions of the “unpresentable”. The state/head of state is outside of the count –in Badiou’s terminology the equivalent for the ancient “rex solutus est a legibus” (the king is released from the laws). Most notably, the name of the collaborateur state installed in Vichy under Pétain was changed from French Third Republic to simply the French State.
The two events in the Pétainist transcendental – corresponding to a “negative event” of social revolution and a “positive event” of state or head of state resulting in a despotic ‘correction’ of the negative event – bear great structural resemblance to the two apparently irreconcilable elements of Badiou’s ontology - Being (positive-state) and Event (negative-revolution) – more universally, state and history.

In essence, the only manner in which the infinite state could exist (or inexist), securing Oneness of Being infinitely, is as an infinite coup in permanence.

In a time though of uprisings and insurrections against the state and even the idea of the state, some of which have been able to shake the “unfailing stable” as Badiou has conceded – one might ask if an ontology such as his presuming the infinitude of the state – might itself be in need of a coup/rescue.

The incurable melancholy of the system (Baudrillard) will have been the infinite unthinking of this thought.

The Undecidability of Capital

2010-12-28T21:56:00.000-08:00

1. Prolegomenon
2. Derrida on his Knees
3. The Secret
4. Spirit:Time
5. What is Capital besides Capital? (or Postone ‘de-forms’ Marx)
6. The Subject as Double Substance

1. Prolegomenon

Why is it that capitalism does not have to work – in the sense that communism does? Whether it works or it is perceived to be broken, almost irreparably – nothing can affect its survival – its perpetuation. This seems to be anti-Darwinist or anti-evolutionary. An organism which survives merely because it is – not because it is the best or fittest. Broken eternal capitalism is a prime example of ‘inoperative power’. Its indifference to perfection or even desirability is already rooted in the indifference of money to ‘whatever commodity’ as long as such a commodity can ceaselessly perform the miracle of turning money into more money. As Marx writes: “The capitalist knows, that all commodities, no matter how shoddy they look or how bad they smell, in faith and in truth are money, (…) and besides that, miraculous means to make out of money more money.” [“Der Kapitalist weiß, daß alle Waren, wie lumpig sie immer aussehen oder wie schlecht sie immer riechen, im Glauben und in der Wahrheit Geld, (…) sind und zudem wundertätige Mittel, um aus Geld mehr Geld zu machen.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital Erster Band, Marx Engels Werke abbreviated MEW Band 23, Berlin, 1975, p. 169)] In a similar vein, Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts notes that the capitalist can make a greater profit from derelict ‘cellar-dwellings’ rented to the proletariat than from the rent from palaces – as capital although a science of wealth, is also a science of perishing (darben) – both in the commodities it can convert to ever greater value and the molding (including deforming) of desire necessary for their willing consumption. “Das rohe Bedürfnis des Arbeiters ist eine viel größere Quelle des Gewinns als das feine des Reichen. Die Kellerwohnungen in London bringen ihren Vermietern mehr ein als die Paläste (…)” [“The raw desire of the worker is a much greater source of profit than the fine one of the rich. The cellar flats in London yield more for their landlords than the palaces (…)”, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (1844) in Marx Engels Werke abbreviated MEW Band 40, Berlin, 1990, pp. 551-552)]

Marx speaks of the ‘rawness’ of capital towards the underclass complementary to the ‘fineness’ towards the monied class corresponding to Wesen (essence) and Schein (appearance). Capital or what Marx calls in his 1844 manuscripts – the national economy – acts upon the whole of what is human through its regime of desire and desirelessness. It imposes on both the capitalist and the worker an unnatural asceticism. They assume the ‘life mask’ of the “usurious miser and the ascetic productive slave” (Marx, op. cit., p. 549) – under the premise that what I expend I have taken away from the accumulation of capital. Here capital is indistinguishable from the ‘science of morality’. The uneasy duality of luxury and frugality (excess and dearth) flowing through capital and its national economy is split between the human agents of capital and itself. Human renunciation nurtures the luxury of capital. As Marx writes: money can travel, go to the theatre, to balls, eat, be a patron of the arts, knowledge, move in society…The less you are, the less of yourself you expend, the more you have deposited in your second alienated imperishable life, your capital. On the other hand desire in the sense of a feeling of lack, a need aroused in me by the other in order to lure me into spending money on whatever commodity is supposed to fill that lack is an absolute condition of any accumulation of capital. Long before the capitalist market, Socrates, standing in the agora, observed – “how many things there are which I don’t want.” Epicurus following in that tradition of resistance to desire advised a correspondent who asked him how to increase his wealth - decrease your desires.

Desire (Drang), which Schelling saw as “the pre-form of spirit”, is immanently corrupted and in a permanent state of mauvaise foi as a hostage of capital. (see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt, 1982, p. 202) The ‘inoperative’ – saves himself up from labour – in the way the worker used to save his money instead of wasting it on “fleeting desires”. The inoperative’s asceticism is the abstinence from activity, from action. One renounces action. Could this antinomy of luxury (debauchery) and asceticism in capitalism underlie the movement in Schopenhauer’s thought-construct from affirmation to negation of the will to live?

Capital does not necessarily imply an ever evolving higher level of civilisation – but can do just as well or better with a worse one, as long as the basic conditions of capital or M-C-M’ (money-commodity-more money) themselves are given. Self-preservation is not an absolute value – it should hover at the point of neediness. Neediness is the appropriate mode for the self-preservation of the worker (includes all non-capitalists in capitalism); it is also “the principle of national economy”. In this way morality protrudes into the “essence” of the national economy.
Capital or money have desires (Bedürfnisse) which must be satisfied, the worker must practice being without desire, being wasted.

The Roman Empire was built on Roman Army bread made of spelt flour, the Egyptian pyramids on pharaonic bread made of kamut flour – the British Empire (Bath), says an Englishman – an old Bluecoat boy – was built on ‘Mother’s Pride’. One of those white nothing loaves. Less than air. The British are the Luftmenschen in the succession of imperialists. The Scots at least have their oat biscuits – they eat them like the Indios in the Andes chew on their coca leaves – to stave off exhaustion while mounting the heights in thin air.

Just as in the figure of just going on there is an implicit ‘belief’ in the unending repetitive character of a series or rule, we carry around an apriori syllogistic rhetorical structure in thinking which presupposes that one thought must follow from another thought and so on. But must it – does it? In the same way actions, occurrences follow from other actions or occurrences in the empirical or historical world – otherwise they are merely ‘contingent’. But can they both follow and not follow – be related and unrelated. In an absolutely contingent world this would probably be possible. The assumption that things or thought must follow from one another imposes a (science-esque) mimetic flux on the form of phenomena – their way of changing or passing by staying the same – a kind of flux of identity. This is also a flux of logos – logos implies that everything must be connected with everything else. Logos can appear in the form of a hierarchy of principles exerting force through various stages of methodical generalisation until it reaches bottom at the empirical data. Both the flux and the scale are ancient models – although the hierarchical logos as Adorno and Horkheimer develop in Dialectics of Enlightenment was at the threshold of Enlightenment – in Bacon’s treatises on science. (see Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Philosophische Fragmente, Amsterdam, 1968, p. 17)

Each moment of the flux is a repetition of the one before so that in going on there is only before never after. Badiou is quite taken by Beckett’s ‘bad verse’ (vers de mirliton) about such a flux of the same – what are numbers other than this. In the counting of numbers there is the utter assumption that more will always be the same as less – the unit of one added to a transfinite number is no different than the unit of one added to one. Is this truth? Is the following of the same by the same a kind of verification of the same? Would then conversely a following of the same by the other be a falsification of the same? Or of the other? In the following of the same by the same there is only a change by substitution – that which was in the place of now moves out of this place – or as Badiou would say is then non-being. But it is replaced by a replica of itself – so the following of the same by the same is an unending substitution of being by non-being. This is the thing’s undecidability. Beckett’s verse is a kind of faux-Heraclitean homily:
“Flux causes (one notes already that flux itself is seen as a ‘cause’ sm)
That every thing
Even in being,
Every thing,
Thus this one here,
Even this one here,
Even in being
Is not.
Let’s speak about it.”
(quoted in Alain Badiou, “The Writing of the Generic: Samuel Beckett” in Condtions, London, 2008, p. 251)

This just going on expressed in Beckett’s verse has nothing to do with Hegelian being-becoming says Badiou, - it is a site of the generic human in a work of fiction – yet it is situated within the historical epoch of the ‘Hegelian’ becoming of capital. How is that possible? The generic human as a fiction of just going on of the same subsists within or parallel to the transformation of the same in non-human capital. Are they then simultaneous to one another? Badiou is “happy” to call the economy of Beckett’s texts “ancient”. More precisely, Beckett’s fiction is composed according to the “five ‘supreme kinds’ of Plato’s Sophist” (Badiou, , op. cit., p. 254) . “We could say that these supreme kinds, Movement, Rest, the Same, the Other, the Logos (…) constitute the reference points, or primitive terms, for an axiomatic of humanity as such.” (ibid.)

The truth of generic humanity in a work of fiction in the ongoing epoch of capital is ancient. Although the generic in Badiou’s sense is a reduction of all quality to quantity, an unbinding of all that is bound, which can only occur in capitalism. Between one nostril and the other lies the Sahara, says Giacometti. Beckett’s art is a work of fiction – a “fiction of generic writing” (Badiou) – but in every fiction there must be something which is not fiction otherwise how would one recognize it as fiction? In Beckett’s case it is the generic (“oriented towards essence, or Idea”, Badiou, ibid.) which is the non-fiction of his fiction.

“That the thing can simultaneously be held in the place where it is and in the place where it is not is given in the image of the flux; this flux, however, is never the synthesis of being and non-being, and is not to be confused with Hegelian becoming.” (Badiou, op. cit., p. 252) This balancing of the thing between being and not-being in the flux of the same (mimetic flux) is what Badiou calls its undecidability. But Beckett’s flux of the same seems to elude simultaneity – for if something is to come, something else has to go. What kind of myth is that? The myth of the number?

2. Derrida on his Knees

I saw an odd clip of Derrida on You Tube – speaking about Heidegger in some dreary shabby classroom (Jacques Derrida on Martin Heidegger 2000). One sees a few smirking auditors behind him. He is dressed in a pristine black jacket and grey trousers, as if one could take his sartorial elegance for granted although somehow out of place, he holds a microphone, he is in front of a table on a dais painted black or dark blue. The table is covered with a blue cloth. The most incongruous element in the scene is that he is ‘standing’ on his knees. No explanation. A sheer fact. Hard to interpret. Is that a partial definition of a fact? It resists (desists?) any ultimate interpretation – but allows for an indefinite amount of speculation. This could be an axiom of ‘speculative realism’. The clip itself was not very revealing either. Derrida disagrees with some things Heidegger says about “animality” (“that animals don’t speak, don’t die, are poor in world” – he is suspicious of this, - “it has heavy consequences”). He also “parts company” with Heidegger about other things such as technology, epochality. His tone of voice and facial expressions are emphatic, demanding. Derrida’s tie hangs suggestively below his belt – the angle of his tilting – like a plumb line – showing how much he deviates from the shortest distance to the floor. The impression is one of self-dwarfing. Is Derrida assuming the position of the ‘penitent god’? God who asks forgiveness from humanity? Benjamin suggests this aspect of God-ness in his fragment on “Capitalism as Religion” – God is implicated in the debt/guilt of capitalism and must seek atonement. Sacrifices are made to atone the guilt of God. The crucifixion was another act of God asking forgiveness from his creatures for their creaturely-ness. Or is Derrida rather enacting a kind of Dostoyevskian gesture of humility – such as those required or carried out by the various capricious holy men or holy fools who populate his novels. In The Possessed penitents visiting a famous holy man must approach him on their knees. When he elects to accept their penance they are made to drink a horribly over sweetened tea (according to their degree of sinfulness) all the while still on their knees. The enigmatic holy man in The Brothers Karamazov, the ailing Starez, goes down on his knees in front of Dmitri, one of the brothers, during a tumultuous family audience of the Karamazovs in his hermitage cell. No one knows why. It is just the mystery of the divine holy impulse. Although a sceptical monk who witnesses this genuflection – attributes it to the showmanship of the dying Starez. The holy man senses a crime will take place. Later one will say he foresaw everything.
Dmitri had just ridiculed his father for wooing a woman desired and courted by both father and son.

Is Derrida the penitent at the feet of Heidegger, the holy man – or the self-effacing holy man bending his knee to the ‘sinner’ Heidegger in absentia?

The Starez, a figure much admired by Wittgenstein, is a monk whose historical religious function (not just his but the institution of Starez-hood) is to accept the soul and will of those coming to him and to rule it as his own. This is the spiritual way – through slavery to freedom. Something similar happens in de Sade’s societies (communities) – except it is solely of the body. “Abolishing the property of one’s own body as of the other bodies is a phantasy inherent in the operation of the perverse; the pervert inhabits the body of the other as his own and thus infuses the other body with his own.” (Pierre Klossowski, “Sade und Fourier” in Lektüre zu de Sade, Frankfurt, 1981, p. 224) The Starez rules the body through the soul, de Sade’s figures rule the body through the body. Starez’ rule is theocracy – de Sade’s is biopolitics.

Derrida was trapped/caught on a video by a random contingent spectator/camera who extracted this moment out of a continuum of an unknown duration. Although some element of choice or decision can be read into Derrida’s kneeling position – at least it is physically difficult to spontaneously kneel while giving a lecture (like opera singers acting a role while singing) and equally difficult to abruptly end such kneeling. This extract of less than a minute, the epitome of insignificance, could have remained a recorded fact among the millions circulating seen and unremembered on the internet (just like thought itself – you have to have thought much to forget much as Robert Walser said), if it had not been ‘seized’ by a second act – that of my protocol and futile (useless) interpretation.
Perhaps this fact is not just on video but also in writing somewhere already, a ‘curated’ video - although unknown to me. My act of impaling by writing is my own first appropriation of this visual fact – the ‘trace’ of an inexplicable gesture. Is my writing a third degree of reality? First the act of kneeling – the capture of that specific moment as in a witnessing by the camera operator is the second. The use of knee bending in literature has less power than the fact of Derrida’s filmed kneeling, although it may have been itself an ‘onto-theatrical’ gesture. In literature such an act would seem ‘excessive’. In ‘life’ or the filmed version Derrida’s kneeling radiates the “brutality of the fact” (Francis Bacon) – no amount of interpretation can change or erase it. One can only shake one’s head like the woodcutter sitting in the ruin of Rashomon Gate staring into the rain in the beginning of Kurosawa’s film Rashomon and repeat “I don’t understand.”

The imperviousness of the fact (factum brutum) is the ‘secret’ – Derrida’s secret is his own gesture of powerlessness. The kneeling position mimics an amputee – one does not see his feet anymore. That of course is the front view – the fortuitous angle. Those behind Derrida were not privy to this illusion of a footless lecturer – as in any magic trick - it all has to do with the position of the spectator.

The room itself seems to be miniaturized. The scale of the room where the audience is sitting is greater than the site (spot) where Derrida is kneeling on the dais. The room seems to shrink down on him like an inverted pyramid. As a dramatic character he is reminiscent of Mnouchkine’s interpretation of the tragic king Richard the Second in her staging of Shakespeare’s eponymous play. Richard is obdurate and arrogant – unaware until too late of the conspiracy against him by his rebellious vassals. The actor portraying the king was made up to an extreme pallor – looking almost Japanese – and confined to a wheeled vehicle – a hybrid of a wheelchair and a chariot – as if he had wheels instead of legs, already lowered in stature, before being toppled or floored by his adversaries. Derrida is the king and at the same time one of the conspirators against the king - “Je suis la plaie et le couteau!” (I am the wound and the knife!, Baudelaire, “L’Héautontimorouménos”).

Is Derrida’s kneeling a symptom of his circumcision neurosis?

3. The Secret

The secret is like a fact, because it is of language but not only of language – it is also the withholding of language. Otherwise it would not be a secret. It can potentially be the infinite withholding of language, if the secret is ‘kept’ absolutely – it ceases to be just a secret, it ceases to be in total. The absolute secret tends to nil, to void, to absence. So it is a fact of absence. The attributes of language cease to inform it – no rhetoric, no sophistry can take hold of a secret. The secret can be of a fact – besides being a fact – for instance the secret identity of someone, the secret hiding place of something valuable, stolen – but all secrets must be susceptible to being known or unknown. The ‘secrets of the universe’ are not really secrets – because no one ‘has’ them either to divulge or conceal. Hence truth is not a secret as the concept of aletheia might imply – something which comes out of its hiding. Wherever it is hidden or revealed – whether it is seen or unseen (told or untold?), the truth is indifferent to this hiding or disclosure. Does Wittgenstein have anything to say about the secret – except that he is silent about what cannot be said? But is that a secret? A secret must be sayable – even if not said. A secret is not the ineffable. Truth is indifferent (adiaphoric) to its being true or being known. So a secret could not necessarily be truth. But could a fairy tale or a fiction be a secret? A secret ‘must’ be true or its withholding would be of no consequence, but truth is not a secret. As a secret withers away in its untelling – to this degree it exposes itself to the danger of the ‘unthought’.

But what if anything does the secret have to do with semblance (appearance) or ‘Schein’ – with the veil of the aesthetic?
Benjamin discovers a philosophy of semblance in Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” – and of what seems so nearly the same – of the secret, veiled being. But he is rather confusing in his manner of determining the occult transitions from semblance to secret and the eventual revelation of the secret – and if this is the same as the unveiling of semblance. Can semblance ever be unveiled? One could assume that in the logic of Goethe’s aesthetic there is either semblance or no semblance (the unveiling of the secret) – nor can there be a slow crumbling away of semblance, just as fictions neither age nor become more true. Ottilie is the character in whom Goethe lays the signature of beautiful tragic semblance. She is semblance whose tragedy is to have been chosen as the semblance of tragedy. She is both figure and transfiguration – the static center of what Hebbel likened to an “automaton in an anatomical theatre” (quoted in Walter Benjamin, Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, in Illuminationen, Frankfurt, 1961, p. 135) – her semblance is not compelled by external suffering or violence to its demise. The semblance, which represents itself in her beauty, is one of imminent departure – a figurine meant to be broken, a soft light soon to be extinguished. She is Goethe’s idol of tragedy itself – an embodied fetish of the transition in the novel from the cathartic affect to the sublime.
“Eben dieser Übergang ist es, der im Untergang des Scheines sich vollzieht. Jener Schein, der in Ottiliens Schönheit sich darstellt, ist der untergehende. Denn ist es nicht so zu verstehen, als führe äußere Not und Gewalt den Untergang der Ottilie herauf, sondern in der Art ihres Scheins selbst liegt es begründet, daß er verlöschen muß, daß er es bald muß.” (ibid., p. 139)
[“Particularly this transition is the one which occurs in the demise (Untergang) of semblance. That semblance, which represents itself in Ottilie’s beauty, is a sinking one. It is not to be understood, that distress and violence lead to Ottilie’s perdition, rather it is grounded (begründet) in the type of her semblance (Schein), that it must go out, that it must go soon.”]

When Ottilie fades away as it is inscribed in her semblance to do – she is not unveiled in her demise – she confirms rather Goethe’s belief in the Platonic doctrine that beauty is inseparable from semblance – the further removed from beauty and semblance, the closer to life – but not truth. Beauty or the illusory beautiful in a work of art is closest in vicinity not to truth but to the expressionless (das Ausdruckslose), which seems to vaguely correspond to the secret.

Plato’s theory of beauty does not refer first to beautiful semblance in art (as the work of art) but to beautiful life. But this is because Plato is caught between despising and shunning art as unacceptable mimesis and his ideal of philosophy as anti-mimetic discourse. Yet beauty as Schein is not merely an imitation of life – if it were it would be reduced to economy – the reproduction of life in its manifest sense where bodies represent other bodies – or so it would seem. This mimetic nature of the ‘general economy’ (Bataille) can be traced back to its “abysmally mimetic” original event – the work of death or the sacrifice. The body of the sacrifice represents or imitates the body of the community or its economy – which is the same thing. The ‘work of death’ is substituted for and anticipates the ‘work of life’. This is almost the opposite movement to that of a Heideggerian ‘unconcealing’ qua aletheia – as the sacrifice or work of death ‘reveals’ in advance what is normally concealed by the ‘work of life’. First comes the unconcealing – then the concealing. (see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, Stanford, 1998, p. 124, note 124)

Benjamin’s aesthetic of beautiful semblance as necessarily ‘irrevocably’ veiled has little to do with any kind of ‘unconcealing’. On the contrary – beauty’s “law of essence” (Wesensgesetz) is such that it only appears (erscheint) veiled. Without the veil, beauty would cease to be beauty. The veil is also its constitutive secret – Adorno speaks of the necessary “enigma character” (der Rätselcharakter) of art. That is why art cannot be appropriated through understanding – the more one ‘understands’ the further away the art, it veils itself in the misdirected understanding of the spectator. The only art, which can be understood totally without a remainder, is not art at all. “Als konstitutiv aber ist der Rätselcharakter dort zu erkennen, wo er fehlt: Kunstwerke, die der Betrachtung und dem Gedanken ohne Rest aufgehen, sind keine.” [The enigma character however is recognizable as constitutive, there where it is missing: works of art, that are exhausted in consideration and thought without a remainder, are not any.]
(Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt, 1970, p. 184)

A standard move of deconstructionist philosophy – in the literary sphere, obviously most amenable to such procedures of extraction and subtraction, is to carve out a figure from a text (for instance Bartleby) which functions then as a type or model. Rather than seeing this as the collapse of the aesthetic, the fabrication of such a type is the way of ‘mastery’ or conquest of the text. The seemingly trivial question appearing as the title of Heidegger’s essay on Zarathustra reveals the predatory intention – “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?”. One knows that whatever the answer - it will have only one timbre – the destruction of the enigma. Out of such a destruction of the source, power is set free for the reconstruction of an anti-aesthetic ontological monument – in this case of Nietzsche himself. The monumentalizing drive articulates itself in Lacoue-Labarthe’s etymological frenzy (fever) surrounding the word Ge-stell (Heidegger) which he traces to its provisional ‘Greek’ origin in “stele”– meaning statue or monument as that which is present and erected. “What predominates and what joins poiesis (or even techne) and technology—in a common, though unequally, unthought [impensée] of aletheia—is precisely the static determination of Being.
Ge-stell is primarily and fundamentally the stele. (…) this amounts to saying that Ge-stell is a word for presence—with presence here interpreted as stele, or, since it is always necessary to conjugate everything with (the forgetting of) aletheia, unconcealment interpreted as erection.” (Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, op. cit., p. 69)

(Heidegger and Badiou, two points on the curve of ontology, stand for non-metamorphosing or barren philosophy – never anywhere else than with itself alias Being – unable to subtract from itself (not even as sacrifice). Although errors are fertile – the fertility of errors is a substitute or disguise for the sterility of philosophical monuments like Being. Heidegger himself laments the impossibility of Dasein having or perceiving itself from a distance. The asphyxiating closeness of Dasein and its shadow Angst or Sorge (Care) is reminiscent of baroque aesthetics – the nearest possible conjunction of vision and the visible, automatic sight. [See “Baroque Quantities”, Faust Series Opus 9, 13th November 2009 for a reference to the baroque and the monadic enclosure] Heidegger in his regretting the loss of distance, longs for the romantic ‘mood’ – gone for ever. Being is not romantic. Philosophy as ontology is the economy of stagnant value – value from which all movement, speed of circulation has been extracted. Although Badiou contends that philosophy circulates between ontology and truth procedures. But why should the inverted world suddenly transport or convey truth?)

What would be the purpose of such a bizarre collection of figures cut out of their original textual ambient and turned into statues – the purpose for philosophy (of the Heideggerian-deconstructionist provenance)? It seems that for Heidegger it is the only way philosophy can engorge itself with poetry not for the sake of the aesthetic enigma – but to furnish itself with the means of representing itself in figures or types (Gestalt). Thus one will find figures from Nazi propaganda such as Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter Herrschaft und Gestalt (The Worker - Rule and Type) next to scavengings from poetic sources such as Rilke’s Angel and of course Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Once they have undergone philosophical branding – the ensuing types become indistinguishable convicts in philosophical detention, ‘bad’ and ‘good’ company herded together in one confinement. The intention, desire, relentless strategy is that such figured types displayed behind philosophical bars, painfully unconcealed in a metaphysical freak show, can never become enigmas again. Aesthetic loss is philosophical (ontological) gain. Poetry (art) becomes directly metaphysical (truth bearing) but only when imagination (fiction) is seized upon by philosophy. This approximates what Badiou (also in the wake of Heidegger) would call the state of being a “condition” of philosophy; he admits that all these conditions are necessarily external to it. Art or especially poetry is one of those conditions. Lacoue-Labarthe makes this ‘dependency’ of Heideggerian philosophy upon that which it would also subordinate most explicit: “For if Zarathustra is a figure, in the strongest sense (and we will see in a moment that for Heidegger it is a historical necessity that commits metaphysics, in the process of completing itself, since Hegel, to (re)presenting itself (sich darstellen) in figures, as well as to representing (vorstellen) transcendence, from the perspective of the “subjective” determination of Being, as the form, figure, imprint, type of a humanity. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Jünger’s Worker, even Rilke’s Angel – (…)” (Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., p. 52). More tentatively, Lacoue-Labarthe asks in a footnote if one shouldn’t add “Freud’s Oedipus and Marx’s Proletarian” to the row of “subjective” determinations of Being. “Marx’s Proletarian” though would utterly resist being trimmed to a ‘type of a humanity’ – if any type at all, then a type of Capital. If though Lacoue-Labarthe’s perspective is of a ““subjective” determination of Being”, then one could more plausibly conceive of ‘Marx’s Capital’ as fitting into this series of types. Marx identified Capital as the ‘automatic subject’ of its own production process in the first volume of Capital – Capital in Marx’s dialectical presentation is already metaphysical and would not to have to undergo any forced conversions to achieve such transcendence. The capitalist, another possible ‘type’, may seem to be pursuing ‘subjective purposes’, but only insofar as he is the ‘conscious porter’ (“bewußter Träger”) of “the objective content of circulation – the valorisation of value (…)” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital Erster Band, Marx Engels Werke abbreviated MEW Band 23, Berlin, 1975, p. 167).

The capitalist is a conscious subject only to the degree that he ‘loses’ his subjectivity in his imitation of the restless movement of unceasing profit – the self-processing process of capital. Capital, on the other hand, is the “automatic subject” of its own self-valorisation, because, despite its constant alternating metamorphoses into money and commodity, it never loses itself in this movement. “It (value) moves constantly out of one form into the other, without losing itself in this movement, and transforms itself in this way into an automatic subject.” [“Er geht beständig aus der einen Form in die andre über, ohne sich in dieser Bewegung zu verlieren, und verwandelt sich so in ein automatisches Subjekt.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., p. 169)] The capitalist, as the subject who loses his subjectivity in the subjectivity of Capital, is only such when he functions as ‘personified capital’, or when his subjective purposes are those of capital endowed or gifted with his own “will and consciousness” (for what is subjectivity other than will and consciousness?) – those purposes being the “growing appropriation of abstract wealth”. (ibid., pp. 167-168)
Could one speak of an ‘original’ or a ‘derived’ type – the archetype and its ectype? Would Capital be the original (metaphysical) type, the capitalist the derived one – in the sense of the creator and the created? The purposes of the capitalist, says Marx, are never use-value (Gebrauchswert), only profit – value for capital. The authenticity of the derived capitalist type or subject – as type is a subjective determination of being according to Lacoue-Labarthe - is greater, the more the ectype capitalist personifies the (original) archetype capital. The more the capitalist is conscious of his will the more he (his will) personifies or transports the will of capital. The more his will is the will of capital, the more authentic and free it feels, the more lost it is in capital.

The identity of the capitalist’s will and the will of capital is what constitutes the moral certainty of the type. In an almost Schopenhauerian sense, the capitalist is an “appearance of the will” (Erscheinung des Willen) of capital, the same will which is objectified in any other thing alias commodity or money. Musil writes in the second volume of “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” – in a conversation between Ulrich and Director F. “Das Geld ist ein Vernunftwesen.” (Money is a being of reason.) because money decides where it wants to be spent – he should have said – money is a being of will. Ulrich, the logical mathematical hero of the novel seems to imply that the ‘ecstatic society’ Kakanien – Austro-Hungary in the last year of its belle époque 1913 - is at the most intermittently rational, whereas money is the guarantee of a continuous flow of ratio. Money is always rational. Money means “Großkapital”. The ‘reason’ of money is also the model for the logic infusing Musil’s caricature of a scientific action-culture – quantitative, exact, barbaric– the “logical structure of the world” (Carnap). Besides “Großkapital” – the types, which inhabit this world, are merchants, warriors, hunters and scientists.
The other half of the story – “world history” - is ‘love’ or passion. “Denn die Weltgeschichte ist mindestens zur Hälfte eine Liebesgeschichte.” (motto of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Hamburg, 1987, Band II)
Musil’s source for his observation “Money is a being of reason.” may have been Heraclitus – a fusion of two of his axioms: “Fire is gifted with reason.” [“Das Feuer ist vernunftbegabt.” In Heraklit Fragmente, München, 1986, B64a, p. 23] and “For fire exchange is everything and fire is for everything like money for gold and gold for money.” [“Für Feuer ist Gegentausch alles und Feuer für alles wie Geld für Gold und Gold für Geld.” op. cit., B90, p. 29] By a simple substitution – fire is like money, money is thus gifted with reason.

This money though is not the money of the Schatzbildner (hoarder of treasure), who wishes to ‘rescue’ or extract it from the circulation sphere, it is money which follows money (which is to say capital, the ‘man of the crowd’), best rescued in exposing itself over and over to circulation. Money follows money also means money imitates money in the pursuit of ever greater surpluses – even to its own perdition as in the case of a general crisis of finance, ‘credit crunch’ or more specific fraudulent schemes - the Ponzi scheme etc. ‘Money makes the world go round’ deteriorates (disappears) into money chasing its own tail.

This moral certainty of the capitalist ectype translates into the cult of authenticity of the bourgeois subject – his supposed absolute identity with himself or ‘facticity’. This authenticity, says Adorno, is a lie, a fiction of identity – or rather the true identity of the circulation sphere with itself. As a type – the authenticity of the bourgeois subject – merely certifies (determines) its absolute replaceability or the ultimate fungibility of things, their quantifiability as epiphenomena of capital (fetish).

The ‘authenticity’ which Adorno rejects is an attribute of something which is in itself false – the bourgeois subject – the substrata of any ‘authenticity’, it is more than false, it is a ghost, says Adorno, following Schopenhauer. For Adorno ‘inauthenticity’ is a way of rescuing the ‘human’ never in itself ‘original’ – always an imitation of other humans. The ‘authentic’ is a cipher for the spectrality of the subject – or the “trotzige und verstockte Beharren auf der monadologischen Gestalt” [“defiant and stubborn insistence upon the monadological type (Gestalt)”, Theodor W. Adorno, “Goldprobe” in Minima Moralia, Frankfurt, 1980, p. 204]

Theatricality overturns the false life of Echtheit – authenticity. Inauthenticity is a mimetic form – as in playing oneself (recalling Nietzsche) – the inauthenticity of the subject becomes true to the degree that his authenticity is revealed as a lie: “Die Gleichsetzung von Echtheit und Wahrheit ist nicht zu halten.”[“The equation of authenticity and truth is not sustainable.” Adorno, op. cit., p. 202].

The inversion of Echte (authentic) and Unechte (inauthentic) leads Adorno to the conclusion – “Was nicht verdorren will, nimmt lieber das Stigma des Unechten auf sich. Es zehrt von dem mimetischen Erbe.” [Whatever does not want to wither, accepts rather the stigma of the inauthentic. It draws on the mimetic legacy.” Adorno, op. cit., p. 204]

But one cannot be sure if this is not a piece of counterfeit (spurious) advice – as Adorno calls this mimetic behavior the “Urform von Liebe” (Ur-form of love) in which the “priests of authenticity” scent “Spuren jener Utopie, welche das Gefüge der Herrschaft zu erschüttern vermöchte.” [“traces of that utopia, which could shake the structure of domination”, ibid.]. One can almost hear Adorno mocking Bloch as one of those ‘priests of authenticity’. But is Nietzsche really one of them?

Heidegger’s answer to the self-posed question, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” - is that he is the teacher who has come to teach the overcoming of the spirit of revenge. Revenge casts all objects as degraded objects. This spirit of revenge (“persecution”) is supposed to have pervaded all thinking until this day – “(…) all representation to this day of beings with regard to their Being (…)” (Martin Heidegger, Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?, Review of Metaphysics, March 1967, p. 421) Yet what is Heidegger’s or the onto-metaphysical appropriation of an aesthetic enigma in the vulgar attempt to demystify it – anything other than a revenge – Heidegger’s revenge on Nietzsche? Considering Nietzsche’s self-stylizing of his philosophy as theatre (Schein) or the theatre of self-semblance, the antidote to Being – Heidegger’s requisitioning of Zarathustra for the moral improvement of ‘humanity’ is tantamount to the closing down of Nietzsche’s theatre. “Meine Philosophie umgedrehter Platonismus: je weiter ab vom wahrhaft Seienden, um so reiner schöner besser ist es. Das Leben im Schein als Ziel.” [“My philosophy (is) an inverted Platonism: the further away from true being, the more pure beautiful better it is. Life in semblance is the goal.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 7, Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzimo Montinari, München, 1988, Nachgelassene Fragmente Ende 1870 - April 1871, 7 [156], p. 199]
Still, Heidegger must admit at the end of his essay in the “Note on the Eternal Recurrence of the Same”, that he remains confounded by Nietzsche: “Nietzsche himself knew that his “most abysmal thought” remains an enigma.” (op. cit., p. 431)

There is no theatre without a revenge tragedy. In this sense Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre of degraded objects, realities (such as the funfair) and actors is an exemplary theatre of revenge.

4. Spirit:Time

If the capitalist is the subject whose subjectivity is lost in capital – does that mean that the proletariat is the subject whose subjectivity can be found in capital? Does Marx imply this symmetry – or are they both lost?

It would seem there is rather an asymmetry or even rupture in Marx’s theatre of capital. The capitalist is the “character mask” of capital – but what mask does the proletariat represent? Or – what does the proletariat personify in the sense that the capitalist personifies capital? The proletariat qua proletariat seems to be so reduced, so much an appendage of the production process that he does not even have (need) a mask. He does not personify labour – he is labour. Or rather abstract labour. Abstract labour is quantified labour – having no particular qualities besides being average social labour. The measure of abstract labour is the time of its working. Does the proletariat personify time – the particular time of the production process? Does it acquire its potential universality – meaning beyond the regime of capital – from its intimate relation to time? A time beyond capital?

Although the capitalist is a personification of capital – in a sense possessed by capital, having ‘sacrificed’ his will and consciousness to its ‘eternal return’ – he is not conscious of such a sacrifice. As the personification of capital he is not aware of himself as “pain and contradiction” (Nietzsche) – he regards himself in the glow of capital as ‘free and authentic’. The eternity of capital imbues the capitalist ‘subject’ with a share of its own immortality. As the character mask of capital the capitalist is pure pleasure (Lust) – and pleasure as Nietzsche writes in “Also sprach Zarathustra” seeks eternity. But pleasure like will is semblance (Schein) and appearance. Being, says Nietzsche, is only pain and contradiction – but we live in that other illusion or semblance – that of becoming – in every moment of which the “secret of pain” must lie dormant. Semblance determines “empirical being” – although that is not “true being”- but there is no ‘way’ to this true being.

As the character mask of capital, the capitalist has no immanent relation to time, he is not constituted qua character mask by time in the way the proletariat is determined by time – the unitary socially average time of abstract labour. The capitalist is ‘above’ time in the way capital is timeless, eternally metamorphosing in its repetitive fashion of self-valorisation and self- devalorisation (‘crisis’). The proletariat is the embodiment of quantified unspecific labour time. His ‘role’ in Capital is not ‘above’ time but ‘in’ time – he is of the order of finitude, hence ‘closer’ to being than the semblance of infinitude embodied in capital and its personified agent – the capitalist. This being in time of the proletariat is another way of saying that the physical life and life in capital of the proletariat tend to ever closer identity. The time for his physical reproduction is a quantifiable but varying fraction of the time he serves capital – the ‘remainder’ is gratis time in which value arises. His life-time is a function of his formal quantified time for capital. Hence, the capitalist feels ‘free’ and ‘authentic’ in his personification of the immortality of capital, its absolute semblance of eternal return or will (in Nietzsche’s sense). The proletariat on the other hand feels inauthentic (closer to ‘true being’) and unfree as the ‘personification’ of abstract labour or his absolute identity (in terms of the absolute negativity of capital) with formal ‘empty’ time. The proletariat is conscious of himself as finitude, as time, in his state of being the measure of the time of abstract labour. “We are not measuring time, we are ourselves a measure of time.” (Shannee Marks, “Body of Grammar: Body of Pain” (Exhibition Writings from The Accident Colony Triptych, Austrian Cultural Forum London 2008) in Night Work Philosophy Interrupted, forthcoming)
For Marx abstract labour and the time of abstract labour as its measure fuse to near identity. Time is also the mark of quantification – or ‘wound’, a kind of ignominy imprinted (branded) on the proletarian organism. He is nothing but time, nothing more or less than what he quantifies in his abstract labour.

Quoting a factory inspection report of 30th April 1860 in which the ‘open secret’ is acknowledged – “Moments are the elements of profit.” – Marx expressly describes the worker as “personifizierte Arbeitszeit” [“personified labour time”, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., pp. 257-258] He refers not to Hegelian concepts but to the factory jargon of the time – the usual appellation for workers who worked full time was simply “full times”, children under 13 who were only allowed to work six hours were called “half times”: “Der Arbeiter ist hier nichts mehr als personifizierte Arbeitszeit.” [“The worker is nothing more here than personified labour-time.”, ibid.]

The truism “time is money” refers to this obliquely in terms of circulation - the price paid by the capitalist in the circulation sphere for the purchase of time (the commodity labour-power) - the only commodity which yields more time than needed for its reproduction alias surplus value or money. “When time money ist, so ist es vom Standpunkt des Kapitals aus nur die fremde Arbeitszeit, die allerdings im eigenlichsten Worte das money des Kapitals ist.” [“When time is money, then it is from the point of view of capital, only the strange (fremde) labour-time, which is in a literal sense the money of capital.”
Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Europäische Verlagsanstalt Frankfurt, reprint of the Moscow edition of 1939 and 1941,
p. 528]

Average social labour-time and abstract labour collapse into one. Here Marx follows Hegel’s determination of time as presented in the second volume of his Enzyklopädie:
“Weil die Dinge endlich sind, darum sind sie in der Zeit; nicht weil sie in der Zeit sind, darum gehen sie unter, sondern die Dinge selbst sind das zeitliche; so zu sein ist ihre objektive Bestimmung.” [“Because things are finite, therefore they are in time; not because they are in time, do they decline, rather things are themselves the temporal, to be like that is their objective determination.” G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden 9, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften II, “Die Naturphilosophie” Frankfurt, 1978, p. 50]

Hegel refers to time as “die totale Negativität” [“total negativity” (op. cit., p. 55)]. Time passes into space and space into time as “the point”. The concrete point is “the place” – unity of here and now (space and time). Spirit is also a category of negativity – Hegel attributes to it the title of “absolute negativity”. One can see a kinship between two ‘competing’ categories of negativity – time as total negativity ‘haunts’ spirit as absolute negativity. Transposed to a Hegelian Marx perspective – one could regard these contradictory negativities as the site of an incongruous rupture between capital as spirit and the proletariat as abstract labour/average time. Is that perhaps the contradiction intended by Nietzsche when he writes: “Wahrhaft seiend ist nur der Schmerz und der Widerspruch.” [“Truly existent is only pain and contradiction.” op. cit., p. 204] There is perhaps no way to this “true being” – but the site of rupture indicates such an ‘abyss’ where the transfigured ‘pain’ of average time embodied in the proletariat (“the broken Ur-pain” – Nietzsche, ibid. p. 205) contradicts absolute semblance or “pleasure” (“the complete Ur-pleasure”, ibid.) embodied in what Nietzsche calls will, Hegel – spirit, Marx - capital. Although for Hegel spirit (Geist) incorporates (is) both contradiction and pain even evil – its dividedness (Entzweiung) belongs to the nature of spirit. Geist is constituted as a contradictory unity or identity of itself and not itself - necessarily exiting from itself into its negative, its other, implying pain and contradiction to return to itself as the idea – to become upon its return the idea returning to itself.
(see G.W.F. Hegel Werke in zwanzig Bänden 10, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, III, “Die Philosophie des Geistes”, Frankfurt, 1976, pp. 25-27) Since Marx and to a certain extent Nietzsche are materialist thinkers – contradictory entities although mutually determinant remain painfully separate.

Following Nietzsche, the absolute negativity of spirit itself can also be translated into notions of time – it is the timelessness of total pleasure in eternal contradiction with the finite time of broken pain. The rupture between infinite capital and finite proletariat rives Marx’s oeuvre itself. The early Marx saw the world primarily through the living being of the worker, the sensuous qualities of labour attesting to the specifically human in its species-being (Gattungswesen) and its capacity for suffering, hence under capital in a state of abject harm and alienation – the later Marx was obsessed by the demonic so-called esoteric abstraction capital, the baroque apotheosis of political economy. This baroque tyrant endlessly contemplating itself – showing itself to itself in a broken mirror, its quasi-spirit, casting all its ‘exoteric’ parts in its own image. The proletariat became a figment of the baroque ‘allegory’ of capital – and the bridge to the living being of labour was more or less interrupted – or at least so it would seem to some interpreters (like Moishe Postone) of Marx’s “mature” work. Yet at the end of the chapter on the transformation of money into capital Marx conjures up a grotesque scene occurring after the buyer and seller of the commodity labour power leave the simple sphere of circulation “the veritable Eden of innate human rights” – and the “physiognomy of our dramatis personae” goes through decisive changes. The antinomy of pain and pleasure implicit in the opposing personifications (‘masks’) of capital and abstract labour becomes physically visible.   “Der ehemalige Geldbesitzer schreitet voran als Kapitalist, der Arbeitskraftbesitzer folgt ihm nach als sein Arbeiter; der eine bedeutungsvoll schmunzelnd und geschäftseifrig, der andre scheu, widerstrebsam, wie jemand, der seine eigne Haut zu Markt getragen und nun nichts andres zu erwarten hat als die – Gerberei.” (Marx, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., p. 191)
[“He, who before was the money-owner, now strides forward as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding.”, Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, New York, 1967, p. 176]

Average labour-time though as a quasi-epithet of the proletariat is not directly (immediately) the biological temporality of the individual ‘Dasein’ who is a worker.
The labour-time of the social body is infinite – it is the time of the species. Not the individual lifetime is the measure of value (nor the reproduction of said lifetime) – but the total average lifetime of the species insofar as it is available as average social labour for capital. The social body now and to come but also the past in the form of ‘dead labour’ is the infinitude of finite beings to be set against the infinitude of the accumulation of capital. The singular member of this infinite set of finite beings is precisely not conscious of his own death in the mass of the species-time. There is no being-towards-death of the species. The species does not die, cannot die – not as long as it is needed by capital.
The temporal unit, which Marx emphasizes, is not the lifetime of (generic) abstract labour (the worker as ‘personified time’) – it is the working day.   Each day, the worker must be able to replenish his expended energy – muscles, brain, nerves etc – to be able to go on the following day. His time is not the time-toward-death – he has little opportunity to be concerned with that – it is the time towards tomorrow and all the other tomorrows. It is a time of self-preservation but not for self – for capital. The ‘self’ of abstract labour, or embodied abstract labour is not really self – only the armature or phantom of a self. How can one know (recognize) one’s ‘own’ time when it is merely devolved into the social average – in other words a statistic, a number? The average social time is the ‘substance’, the essence – the lifetime of the individual is appearance, contingency, accident.

The time of production or average social time – the socially average labour time – implies at least two kinds of quantitative reduction of ‘human’ time. Marx emphasizes that abstract labour is measured and has its magnitude in the time of simple labour – devoid of any particular qualities - for instance labour skills. This is the invention of capitalism as the social totality. In addition, being exchange value, the commodities are made equivalent to one another especially in their all being expressed in terms of the general equivalent money (‘the great leveller’), hence the labour time expended in their production must also be quantitatively equivalent.

The aim for capital – is that the time abstract labour spends in production earning the means of subsistence should itself diminish – leading to more and more ‘disposable’ time for capital. Disposable time (‘time regained’) is itself reified – it becomes a commodity, in its turn raw material (use value) for “varied new products which impose themselves on the market as uses of socially organized time.” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, 1983, p. 151) What else are ‘social media’ than reified time, what Debord calls “spectacular time” – “the time of consumption of images (…) and the image of the consumption of time” (Debord, op. cit., p. 153)?

Some of this time may even appear as leisure or holiday time for the worker – but as Guy Debord notes – in the society of the spectacle – all time in and out of the working day is subsumed under capital, becoming “pseudo-cyclical time”: “Pseudo-cyclical time leans on the natural remains of cyclical time and also uses it to compose new homologous combinations: day and night, work and weekly rest, the recurrence of vacations.” (Debord, op. cit., p. 150) But this pseudo-cycle of the spectacular is only possible because the initial violent wrenching of the proletariat-to-be from his pre-capitalist setting creating ‘free’ producers – was the “violent expropriation of their own time”. (Debord, op. cit., p. 159 - italics in the original) The time of abstract labour is also a degraded time and essentially static.

5. What is Capital besides Capital? (or Postone ‘de-forms’ Marx)

Capital is the present owner (whereby present=eternity) of all time – past, present, future – but itself has no time, is not time. History begins with the loss of innocence – but not second innocence, the timeless time of capital.
As another second innocence, the work of art has a tenuous precarious correspondence with the semblance (Schein) capital. Loss of innocence is always also the loss of time – that to which the work of art strives to return, to regain it. The work of art is the imaginary place where the lost is found (although the finding is not imaginary) – the work is always past – dead labour (die tote Arbeit) just as capital is also ‘congealed dead labour’. (Adorno saw Mahler’s music as one of “absolute lostness”, but in which like in Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu lost time files past again in a ghost parade.) The dead work mourns itself and that which has been lost, but is at the same time necrophilia – hence the potential of baroque contagion in every work of art. The baroque is a cult of the exquisite corpse (the crucified body for example) – a reverse vanitas, the side of life is more horrific than the side of death. The baroque corpse (the dead work of art) keeps its secret like nature. But does that mean the secret is objectified in the work of art, in nature? In capital? Or is the objectified secret already (in) second nature? But how does one know if the secret is kept or not – if love and death have the power to strip away the veil of semblance, as Benjamin writes in his essay on “Die Wahlverwandschaften”, are they not nature? Nature betraying its secret to itself? Second innocence like second nature as in the work of art (der schöne Schein) does not aspire to the fullness of being (seinshaltig). It claims for itself the fullness of not-being. In this sense, Nietzsche as the philosopher of semblance and the destruction of semblance, is also a Gesamt-antidote to Heidegger. Nietzsche’s point of departure is tragedy, theatre – the world as a work of art.
“Unser Schmerz ist ein vorgestellter: unsre Vorstellung bleibt immer bei der Vorstellung hängen. Unser Leben ist ein vorgestelltes Leben. Wir kommen keinen Schritt weiter. Freiheit des Willens, jede Aktivität ist nur Vorstellung. Also auch das Schaffen des Genius Vorstellung. Diese Spiegelungen im Genius sind Spiegelungen der Erscheinung, nicht mehr des Ureinen: als Abbilder des Abbildes sind es die reinsten Ruhemomente des Seins. Das wahrhaft Nichtseiende – das Kunstwerk.(…)Das Sein befriedigt sich im vollkommenen Schein.”
[“Our pain is an imagined (one): our imagination always gets caught in the imagination. Our life is an imagined life. We are not moving a step forward. Freedom of the will, every activity is only imagination. So also the working of genius is imagination. These reflections in genius are reflections of appearance, no longer the ur-one: as images (copies) of the image (copy) they are being’s purest moments of rest. The true not-being – the work of art (…) Being contents itself in perfect semblance.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 7, Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzimo Montinari, München, 1988, Nachgelassene Fragmente Ende 1870 - April 1871, 7 [157], p. 200 – emphasis in the original.
Note: Besides imagination Vorstellung means idea or representation.)]

The destructive impulse of Nietzsche’s philosophy of semblance is directly opposed to Heidegger’s ‘Destruktion’. Nietzsche dissolves being in semblance – Sein in Schein – in the work of art. There is no ground towards which ‘life’ is moving. “We are not moving a step forward.” We only heap copies upon copies. We are not looking for an “Ur-One”. The “copies of copies”, the forest of simulacra, are being’s moments of rest – but being (Sein) cannot exist without semblance (Schein).

So what is capital? Capital is pure quantity, but cannot itself be quantified. “(Das Kapital ist nicht einfache Quantität, noch einfache Operation: sondern beides zugleich.)” [“(Capital is not simple quantity, nor simple operation: but both at once.)” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 519)] Capital like semblance (Schein) as a category of aesthetics (in the sense of transcendental semblance) exemplified in the work of art is not opposed to an essence (Wesen) – but it is a self-sufficient semblance for us. Like Benjamin’s “schöner Schein”, which he found absolutely formed in Goethe’s tragic figure of Ottilie – capital as semblance encompasses in its appearance its own decay. Its decay is not its ‘essence’ – it is integral to its semblance. But as semblance or semblance of decay – this decay in itself has no age, its decay is always new and always old. All its self-negating properties such as the eternal return of valorisation and decapitalisation (‘crisis’) are included within its semblance or ‘totality’. Capital thus is without history. As a value-form, capital performing as semblance has its origins in another more elementary semblance – in money. It cannot be deduced as an aesthetic category (as it appears for us) from the material ‘natural’ substrata of production – but is itself an advanced formation of the mercantile economy of money. “Welthandel und Weltmarkt eröffnen im 16. Jahrhundert die moderne Lebensgeschichte des Kapitals. Sehen wir ab vom stofflichen Inhalt der Warenzirkulation, vom Austausch der verschiednen Gebrauchswerte, und betrachten wir nur die ökonomischen Formen, die dieser Prozeß erzeugt, so finden wir als sein letztes Produkt das Geld. Dies letzte Produkt der Warenzirkulation ist die erste Erscheinungsform des Kapitals.(…)Jedoch bedarf es nicht des Rückblicks auf die Entstehungsgeschichte des Kapitals, um das Geld als seine erste Erscheinungsform zu erkennen. Dieselbe Geschichte spielt täglich vor unsren Augen.”
[“World commerce and world market open the modern life history of capital in the 16th century. If we disregard the material content of the commodity circulation, the exchange of different use-values, and consider only the economic forms, which this process produces, we find its last product to be money. This last product of the commodity circulation is capital’s first form of appearance.(…) However, we have no need to look back to the history of the genesis of capital to recognize money as its first form of appearance. The same history plays daily before our very eyes.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, MEW 23, op. cit., p. 161)]

Capital is ahistorical in the sense that each day it repeats its own history – its birth out of the head of money.

Yet capital has its own ‘internal’ temporal side – mostly neglected in discussions of its spiritual nature – this temporal side though is not value-creating but rather the limit of value, negative and sterile. It is the time of circulation which determines the speed of turnover and accumulation, in other words the realisation of value. This time itself must be deducted from any value realised in the actual circulation process. “Die Zirkulationszeit kommt nur in Betracht in ihrem Verhältnis – als Schranke, Negation – der Produktionszeit des Kapitals; diese Produktionszeit ist aber die Zeit, während welcher es sich fremde Arbeit aneignet; die durch es gesetzte fremde Arbeitszeit.”
[“The circulation-time is considered only in its relation – as a barrier, negation – of the production-time of capital; this production-time is however the time, during which capital appropriates strange (fremde) labour; the strange (fremde) labour-time it has installed.” (Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 528)]

But as there would be no value if the product would remain in the warehouses, all labour which is part of “bringing the commodity to the market” belongs to the production process and adds value. The product is only a commodity when it has entered circulation. These two different times – the circulation time of capital, the periodicity of its turnover measured in a year and the “natural work day” as the measure of labour-time – together comprise what bourgeois political economy ambiguously calls the “labour time” of “working capital”. The mystification, says Marx, which ensues, “liegt in der Natur des Kapitals.” [“lies in the nature of capital” (Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 534)]

Some of this mystificatory “nature of capital” seems to swirl about Moishe Postone’s exegesis of Marx – a certain immanent ‘undecideability’ regarding the nature of capital permeates his text “Time, Labor and Social Domination”. He seems to rediscover some of the illusions of the political economy which Marx sought to dismantle – as if they were new truths – falling into the traps of Marx’s dialectical presentation. For instance – in his zeal to unseat the proletariat as the “subject-object of history”, a view he denounces in “traditional Marxism”, Postone contends instead that Marx’s category of capital has all the attributes of Hegel’s ‘spirit’. Instead of the proletariat Capital is the epochal hero of Marx’s epochal oeuvre – and the “subject-object of history”.

As the name of Marx’s work is Capital and not Labour, it is not surprising that it would be seen as the overriding subject of its own production process. For Marx though capital is a very strange sort of subject – as he writes in the Grundrisse – capital is at all times in its process of valorisation the negation of itself as the overall subject of the movement, which Marx most frequently calls circulation. “Das Kapital aber ist als Subjekt der Zirkulation; die Zirkulation als sein eigner Lebenslauf gesetzt. (…) Das Kapital ist daher in jeder besondren Phase die Negation seiner als des Subjekts der verschiednen Wandlungen.”
[“Capital is as the subject of circulation; presented in circulation with its own life cycle. (…) Capital is thus in each special phase (of circulation sm) the negation of itself as the subject of the various transformations.”
(Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit. p. 514)]

Oddly, the complete ‘life’ of capital, so exhaustively charted by Marx, as it moves in and out of the circulation sphere and production process is missing in Postone’s presentation. Despite his bias towards capital as the primum movens of history – he concentrates like those authors he criticizes almost exclusively on labour and the sphere of immediate production.

Postone is not content with anointing capital as subject of its so-called self-valorisation process - he designates capital as the subject of history, as secular ‘spirit’, claiming that this is how Marx intended his critique be understood. Implicit in Postone’s inference is the notion that the repetitive cycle of capital valorisation and devalorisation, what Marx calls its lifeline (Lebenslauf) – its own reproduction and self-destruction process – is identical with historical process or historical time as such.

Postone cites a crucial well-known passage from the first volume of Capital where Marx analyses the “general formula of capital” as proof of his contention:
“At this point in his exposition, Marx describes his concept of capital in terms that clearly relate it to Hegel’s concept of Geist:
It [value] is constantly changing from one form into the other without becoming lost in this movement; it thus transforms itself into an automatic subject ….In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and of commmodities, it changes its own magnitude,…and thus valorizes itelf….For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization….[V]alue suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which the commodity and money are both mere forms.
Marx, then, explicitly characterizes capital as the self-moving substance which is Subject. In so doing, Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with any social grouping, such as the proletariat, or with humanity. Rather, Marx analyzes it in terms of the structure of social relations constituted by forms of objectifying practice and grasped by the category of capital (and, hence, value). (…) they possess the attributes that Hegel accorded the Geist. It is in this sense, then, that a historical Subject as conceived by Hegel exists in capitalism.” (Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, Cambridge, 2003, p. 75)

But is this the Subject as conceived by Marx? Why would Marx consider capital the subject of history when he develops its forms so as to show that in its operation it is ahistorical – repeating its own history over and over again every day? Irreversible history – the Doppelgänger of the eternal present of the life cycle of Capital – is itself a semblance (result) of a universal quantified time of capitalist production or “circulating capital” in the wide sense. The seeming paradox of at least two different unitary times of capital would disappear if circulation were not the historical-ontological ground of Capital from which it goes out and to which it returns. The two times: the cyclical unitary time (revolutions) of Capital in its complete repetitive cycle of being always what it is not at any particular moment - unifies within itself as its ‘necessary illusion’ – the irreversible time of universal world history.

This ‘universal history’ though is not really history at all but as noted by Guy Debord, it is “(…) still only the refusal within history of history itself.”
“145 With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a world scale. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is gathered under the development of this time. But this history, which is everywhere simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within history of history itself. What appears the world over as the same day is the time of economic production cut up into equal abstract fragments. Unified irreversible time is the time of the world market and, as a corollary, of the world spectacle.” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, Detroit, 1983)

Irreversible history haunts the cyclical “life-act”(Lebensakt) of Capital as its other ‘present’, its ‘spectacle’.

The theme of ‘being of haunting’ – the ‘present’ is the unchanging eternal cycle of capital whereby present has no meaning. If there is only present then present disappears. History is the shadow of that eternal non-present present. History which seems to be the most concrete of all is relegated to a negligible vaporous trail of the quasi-biological yet undying organism (organic cycle) of capital.
(Whatever does not belong to any temporal determination – is transcendental, because it seizes possession of all times. Such as sin (Kierkegaard), decay (entropy), or the accident? Is it possible to raise the temporal itself to the power of the transcendental? To transcendentalize time?)

Capital transforms itself in the circular movement of its circulating self in its various phases of money, commodity, production process, more money, in the market, in the circulation, as rent or interest bearing capital, as credit or finance – at any specific moment always that which it is not as the subject of the whole. If it were to be what it is, it would cease to be in its own endless process of valorisation meaning it would cease to be at all. Hence it is temporal only in a formal sense –it can never be historical.

In all the unitary time of capital there is not one atom of history. Neither can one find, as Postone claims, an “immanent logic of history” in its “alienated form of social relations”. (Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 270) In another passage Postone seems to retreat from this claim – citing “Marx’s analysis” whereby “the capital form of social relations (…)is blind, processual, and quasi-organic.” (ibid.) Capital then is a form of ‘second nature’ – the quasi-organic – as such it cannot constitute an “immanent logic of history” – rather it is itself posited by history, not in itself historical or susceptible to self-transformation in reaction to ‘events’. It is a parasite of events and as such absolute semblance. When Marx refers to history in relation to capital he speaks of a “natural historical process” – a movement of the natural world for which he has discovered the general forms.
But Postone will again attempt to rescue the historical dynamic of capital, its so-called immanent historical logic – which he seems so eager to establish. Despite its ‘blindness’ capital is at the same time, value – somehow the more noble part of capital for Postone – and value “(…)is, as we shall see, a category of efficiency, rationalization, and ongoing transformation. Value is a category of a directionally dynamic totality.” (Postone, op. cit., p. 272)

Marx defines value in the first chapter of Das Kapital as having as its ‘substance’ abstract human labour, whose measure in turn is the time of labour. Abstract human labour represents a multiple complex process of reduction and quantification of human activity. Abstract labour is first of all the most ‘simple’ form of labour or labour in its simple form – this is of course an ideal of simplification. Marx suggests other ways of determining this simplification – it is also an average – but not just any average, it is average social labour determined by the average productivity at any given time in the social body alias capitalist society. Marx does not describe the exact way such a social average is constructed – not in this chapter – its operation is merely assumed. The social average is an indefinite unknown means of quantifying labour, which together with the apparent ‘visible’ abstraction of the measure of time determine the value produced by abstract human labour. This labour thus is not the least qualified nor is it the most qualified – it is an average. (The process of proletarisation described by Marx as “original accumulation” was in most cases a degrading of the skills of labourers – the transfer of these skills to the more efficient machine for the purpose of cheaper production of larger quantities of commodities – irregardless of their quality.) Average social time, the composite of these various processes of reduction or laying bare of labour, is not pure quantity although it is a measure of standardisation. Value is measured by the simple duration of labour-time required for its production as a function of the standard amount of time needed for this act in a given society according to its average level of productivity. This standard of average social labour is a hybrid of cultural, social and technological parameters – itself a model of reified time.
Any system based on an average level of productivity, as is the case in capitalism, can hardly be said to be a “directionally dynamic totality” – as Postone argues. On the contrary, one of the peculiar inner contradictions of capitalism – is its persistent aim to rest at a plateau – the average – to move from unrest to rest – approximating more what Benjamin refers to as a “Dialektik des Stillstands” (dialectic of stagnation) than a dynamic tendency.

Physicists studying cities and corporations have recently confirmed the same tendency of stagnation despite ‘dynamic’ appearances– from a statistical mathematical perspective. Corporations are feeble – this is capital – they have a longevity of about 40-50 years. Cities are indestructible – this is history – the terrain of the ‘multitude’. Cities are a more likely subject of history. Citing the work of Bettencourt and West, Jonah Lehrer writes in the New York Times of 17th December 2010:

“At first glance, cities and companies look very similar. They’re both large agglomerations of people, interacting in a well-defined physical space. They contain infrastructure and human capital; the mayor is like a C.E.O. But it turns out that cities and companies differ in a very fundamental regard: cities almost never die, while companies are extremely ephemeral. As West notes, Hurricane Katrina couldn’t wipe out New Orleans, and a nuclear bomb did not erase Hiroshima from the map. In contrast, where are Pan Am and Enron today? The modern corporation has an average life span of 40 to 50 years.
This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting? After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies, Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when he shows me the linear regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he says. “It’s ridiculous how well the points line up.” The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”
The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.” ” (Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Solves the City, New York Times, December 17, 2010, online)

It seems the physicist’s findings are a mathematical echo of Marx’s discussion in Volume 3 of Capital of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (“As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks.”) as always accompanied by the irresistible self-destructive need of capital to concentrate in ever-greater conglomerations (“ “Companies are killed by their need to keep on getting bigger.” ”). Odd that West presents his findings as if no one had ever discovered these ‘laws’ of capital before.

These looming elements of the ineluctable and recurring crisis of capital – the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and capital’s fatal drive towards unlimited concentration - both utter counter-movements to any dynamic of rational efficiency – are dismissed by Postone as “surface phenomena” of capital. (see “Time, Labor, and Social Domination, op. cit., page 311 note 15) Postone’s “theory of capital” ‘de-forms’ Marx’s critique of political economy in the attempt to free capital of any blemish which could spoil his interpretation of capital as the apex of history or perfect ‘spirit’ – akin to Hegel’s Geist.

6. The Subject as Double Substance

Although dismissive of the so-called “surface phenomena” of capital as accidental or insignificant for the analysis of its nature – Postone presents another such “surface phenomenon” – capital as an “automatic subject” (see passage cited above) as the proof, that Marx saw capital as the subject of history, as Geist. Recalling his presentation of the “general formula of capital”, Marx reveals at the end of the next chapter entitled “The Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital” that this general formula is merely that which is visible in the sphere of circulation. Marx comes to the temporary seemingly paradoxical conclusion that because a capitalist in the long run exchanges equivalents – capital cannot originate in the circulation sphere, but neither can it not not originate in circulation. “It is (…) impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation.” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, New York, 1967, pp. 165-6)

He concludes the following chapter on the “The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power”” almost in symmetry to the ending of the chapter on the “general formula”, so as to warn the reader – what he has seen in the preceding chapters is how capital appears to expand itself spontaneously – but is not how this expansion alias surplus value really arises. The new element he has introduced by the end of the sixth chapter – is that unique commodity which has the power within itself to create value – the commodity of labour power. So if at the end of the chapter 4 in which Postone’s “automatic subject” holds sway Marx writes:
“Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh. M-M’, money which begets money, such is the description of Capital from the mouths of its first interpreters, the Mercantilists.(…)M-C-M’ is therefore in reality the general formula of capital as it appears prima facie within the sphere of circulation.” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, op. cit., pp. 154-155)

At the conclusion of chapter 6 Marx dispels this appearance – showing it to be at the very least incomplete: “Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, (…)Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, op. cit., p. 176)

Marx, the dramatist of capital, is constantly alternating in his presentation between the action on stage and how it appears to the audience (who are also the actors) and that other view from behind and below. On stage the capital spectacle is an automaton – a beloved entertainment in Victorian times – “self-processing value”, “automatic subject”, “self-moving substance”, all the forms of the “general formula of capital M-C-M’ ”. This is a formula inherited from older forms of capital – usurer, merchant capital – grasped as a system in mercantilism. Appropriately, mercantilism was also a system of state economy. The illusion that money directs itself under the tutelage of the state lives on in all forms of monetarism. But Marx was not an early monetarist, assuming that money and money supply exist in a solipsistic ‘other’ economic cosmos apart from production – as Postone sometimes would like to suggest.

(An inchoate ghostly mercantilist-monetarism haunts Postone’s occasional futurist utterances about capitalism – in such a future the market would be abolished, not the capitalist mode of producing ‘value’. The market would be replaced by an ‘administration’ (of what?), “another mode of coordination and generalization” and the “law of value could also be mediated politically.” (Postone, op. cit, p. 291). This sounds suspiciously like some sort of corporatism operating outside of the world market, usually associated with the fascist phase of capitalism – is this the New Chicago School?)

Marx, though, in demonstrating how money is transformed into capital, has only set up the scene on stage to unravel it in the following chapters. The capitalist does not just buy cheap and sell dear – he buys and sells at the value of commodities. Marx exposes though the other indispensable commodity which capital procures in the circulation sphere – the commodity of labour power. This commodity must be consumed by capital in the production process so that capital can re-emerge and expand itself in the circulation sphere.

So in a Hegelian sense capital flows out of itself into its negation – labour-power metamorphosed in the production sphere into abstract labour which creates value – to return to the circulation sphere where this value must be realised as M’ or capital. But Postone further twists Marx and his inheriting of Hegelian dialectical forms. For Postone Hegel is the source for Marx’s so-called discovery of capital as the “subject-object of history” which Postone paraphrases quite literally: “For Hegel, then, the Geist is simultaneously subjective and objective – it is the identical subject-object, the “substance” that is at the same time “Subject”(…)” (Postone, op. cit., p. 72)
But Hegel’s substance is precisely itself and not itself – “Geist and not Geist” (Adorno, Negative Dialektik, op. cit., p. 199) – and as such dialectical. Without the “work of the negative” the substance, even if the substance were “the life of God” would be empty, bland and lifeless writes Hegel. Adorno also criticizes Hegel for “blowing up” Geist into the “Whole” – whereas the “differentia specifica” of Geist is that it is a Subject, “subjectivistic”: “Geist, der Totalität sein soll, ist ein Nonsens (…)” [“Spirit meant to be totality is nonsense (…) ibid.] comparing this thinking to the logic of totalitarian singular parties of the 20th century.

Postone revives a vulgar “identity-philosophy”, denuded of the negativity inherent in both Hegel and Marx. Waxing lyrical, he turns Marx’s critique of capital into a positive concept of pure affirmation – Capital as Geist, Subject and “homogeneous totality” (see Postone, op. cit. pp. 78-79), whereby especially for Hegel Geist is inherently contradictory and divided (entzweit) – in other words negativity.
Marx was able to recognize the dialectic of capital and its negation abstract labour as a double subject or a hybrid substance through the forms of Hegel’s Logic and Phenomenology (e.g. Herr-Knecht, master-slave). This negativity of substance with itself is reciprocal – capital being also the negation of abstract labour.

Contrary to Postone’s claim, that the “mature Marx” of Das Kapital had abandoned his critique of Hegel’s dialectic as an inverted mystified one which had to be turned upside down to discover its “rational core” in the “mystical cover” – Marx reiterates, in an approving response to a Russian reviewer of the Russian translation of Das Kapital, precisely this view in his Afterword to the second German edition of Das Kapital Volume I (London 1873). But in its “rational form” Hegel’s dialectic disquiets the bourgeoisie, because its movement leaves nothing fixed, in its positive grasp of what exists it always includes the negation of what exists implying a “necessary demise” of capitalist social formations – all the more realistic, according to Marx, given the cyclical nature of capital and its always imminent “general crisis”. The essence of Hegel’s dialectic is “critical and revolutionary” (Marx). One wonders why Postone is at such pains to prove Marx has ‘recanted’ his revolutionary ‘demystification’ of Hegel’s dialectic. (see Postone, op. cit., p. 75)

Yet, Postone seems to stumble himself over this ‘duplicity’ of substance in Marx’s Capital – when he remarks in the vicinity of his claim that capital is the identical subject-object of history, that Marx refers both to abstract labour and capital as substance: “(…)at the beginning of Capital he (Marx) himself makes use of the category of “substance”. He refers to value as having a “substance”, which he identifies as abstract human labour.” (ibid.) A few sentences later Postone switches to capital as substance – but now immediately also Subject and Geist. He is unable to show how both capital and abstract labour compose what Hegel designates, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, as “The living substance (…) which is only insofar as it is the movement of positing itself, or the mediation of the process of becoming different (emphasis sm) from itself with itself.” (Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit quoted in Postone, op. cit., p. 72) Hegel continues to emphasize that this “living substance” far from being identical with itself – is as “Subject, pure simple negativity, precisely so the splitting of the simple; or the opposing doubling, which is again the negation of this indifferent diversity and is its opposite:” [“Sie (die lebendige Substanz) ist als Subjekt die reine einfache Negativität, eben dadurch die Entzweiung des Einfachen; oder die entgegensetzende Verdopplung, welche wieder die Negation dieser gleichgültigen Verschiedenheit und ihres Gegensatzes ist:”, G.W.F. Hegel, Vorrede, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke in zwanzig Bänden 3, Frankfurt, 1976, p. 23)]

As Marx writes – capital is produced in circulation and not in circulation. It is precisely due to this splitting or doubling of capital and abstract labour as the source of value, realised in the circulation of capital, that makes it impossible to grasp capital as an identity of any kind – neither of itself with itself (Postone) nor of itself with itself and not-itself – abstract labour. When wealth (stofflicher Reichtum) as in quantities of goods (use-value) does not enter into the circulation sphere – due to forced inactivity, contraction – as in the crisis of overproduction or in a crisis of finance (like in the present – all those abandoned unfinished ghost estates in Ireland) – although these goods have been produced in the capitalist production process through the agency of abstract labour they will still have nil value – or less, as negative value, loss or debt. The production process – so emphasized by Postone – is the site of the potential valorisation of capital – but it is also the site of the consumption of commodities, variable capital (labour-power) and constant capital (machinery, raw materials, etc) Without the transfer of commodities produced in the production process to the circulation sphere – where they are converted into money again, they remain mere material wealth. Hence money is not less original in the production of capital than abstract labour. Abstract labour may be the source of value – money is the form of the realisation of value and surplus value, in other words capital. Ricardo emphasized labour as the source of value – but Sismondi showed how value is always in danger of disappearing in the crisis, devalorising. If Marx would truly think as Postone suggests – he would have fallen behind the level of insight of a Sismondi.

Postone most peculiarly excises the market and property relations from the process of production of capital. He quarantines abstract labour in the production sphere, where it supposedly creates value without the intrusion of money in this process. In this purified world of capital – class struggle and exploitation melt away like “les neiges d’antan”.
“Note that the market-mediated mode of circulation is not an essential moment of this dynamic. (…) If the market mode of circulation does play a role in this dynamic, it is as a subordinate moment (…) To focus exclusively on the mode of circulation is to deflect attention away from important implications of the commodity form for the trajectory of capitalist development in Marx’s critical theory.” (Postone, op. cit., p. 291)

The commodity form only exists in circulation. What else is the commodity form other than the receptacle of dead congealed labour, stripped of its qualities, like Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, in which form it circulates (as money or commodity) in the circulation sphere – just as abstract labour is the quantitative form of living labour engaged in the production process of said commodity form?
Circulation without the commodity is empty. The commodity without circulation has no value. In an absurd way, Postone’s ‘theory of capital’ misses above all capital.

Carthage the Indestructible

2010-10-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

The Empty Marquee Tent in the Woods (on land occupied by the house at its edge)

The melancholy of an empty white marquee. The long table, the hired chairs with their chrome frames and red upholstery give the whole scene the appearance of a red cross tent waiting to receive the victims of a natural or artificial catastrophe. In other words – already a camp. A temporary habitation in the woods cannot possibly have a festive purpose – it can only be a station or secret meeting place to plot disasters elsewhere. The victims are the absent guests at this wedding. A hospital tent run by Wilis – with a ‘mattress grave’ reserved for Heine.

The Rainy Season

“…three nectarines on a plate…
the skin is painted yellow and red
like the Ashikaga silk they sell in the capital
but one nectarine is so light
it must be hollow
only a demon could enter
without marring the surface.
the ferns and vines break
through the floor of the crumbling
veranda
the moon lights up the mulberries
rotting against the white wall
black grapes hang through the thorns of the snaking rose
the night lies in wait for the foxes.”

The moral: A fruit can betray your hopes like a silk merchant.
Any woman could be a lamia – but not any snake.

Horkheimer is mistaken about the “New Testament”. It is not the Book of Love.
1. It is the Book of the Cross and the death by the cross. At the end there is a Body.
2. “The Old Testament” has countless love stories – in particular the Song of Songs. But even the story of Adam and Eve is about love. It is the first love. Adam sacrificed eternal life for love. He sinned for Eve so she would not be alone in the banishment. The “Old Testament” is also the book of seduction.

First comes haunting, then the melody.

The emotion dies in the thought, cire perdu. So if you can explain your love – it’s gone. That’s why Adorno says in Minima Moralia – if you say “I am happy” you aren’t. The most you can say is “I was happy” – the happiness of the lost hours.

First have a Method then interrupt it too soon.

Not-Here-ness is for space what Not-Yet-ness is for time. Something which is not here in space is distant in another way than something not yet in time. More elusive in its presence-absence thus concrete – possibly hidden. Something not yet in time can arouse only a minimal affect. One only can long for what one knows is not-here but somewhere. How can one long for what one does not know at all? That Heidegger dubbed the existent Dasein – being-here shows that he saw being as having a lesser hold in time than in space. Otherwise it should have been known as Da-Zeit - here-time.

The essence of a philosophy of hope is not hopeful in the same way that Heidegger declares “(…)the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” (M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, online) One probably could extend this formula endlessly – although Novalis, Romantic poet, metaphysician and scientist, holds a contrary view - “the performance of mathematics must be mathematical”. If not – a dubious hiatus arises between form and content. But the identity of form and content is an artistic principle of the Romantic; it is style (showing not saying) – not needed in philosophy. Although such identity is volatile – it can reverse itself into non-identity at any moment. The work of art is identical with its non-identical aspects in the sense that it is its own method of interpretation, which it also constantly resists. It is thought and its own unthought, dissembling (semblance) and error, all its ‘fake’ forms - the unavoidable, which as Derrida suggests is there long before the work but is never its subject or ‘essence’. Is Heidegger’s essence of technology mimetic or anti-mimetic?

Why does something have to come into being before it can decay? The universal law of decline or entropy applies in all the tenses – also the futurum. Even redemption is subject to decay. Decaying redemption. Especially if it is endlessly deferred. It gets shopworn. Hope is very similar to postponement in other words disappointment (“make them live in hope”, Marlowe). The law of entropy determines the future to be already obsolete or antiquated – this is especially true of technology. That which is ‘coming’ will in its turn be passing – the indefinite expectation of a future ‘rescue’ projects a simulacrum of openness onto an imaginary temporal plane. Hegel calls it the “bad infinity”. How can one associate hope with the indefinite ‘flowing’ of time into the future – contemplating time in its ceaseless motion, its ever ‘not-yetness’ would rather lead to ‘chronophobia’ such as that which pervades every line of Baudelaire:

“Et le Temps m’engloutit minute par minute,
Comme la neige immense un corps pris de roideur;
Je contemple d’en haut le globe en sa rondeur
Et je n’y cherche plus abri d’une cahute.”
(“And time swallows me minute by minute,
Like an immense body of rigid snow;
I contemplate from above the globe and its roundness
And look no more for the shelter of a hut.” Baudelaire, “Le Gout du Néant” The Taste of Nothing in: Les Fleurs du Mal, no LXXX)

For Baudelaire time is the avalanche coming towards him in its fall not the future toward which he is moving (advancing).
“Avalanche, veux-tu m’emporter dans ta chute?”
(Avalanche, do you want to take me with in your fall?, ibid.)

When truth is historical it is exposed to all the feebleness and ephemerality of the historical – it rises and falls. All such philosophy attributes an extraordinary causality or revelatory power to time itself – “(…)as if Kant had never been, using TIME as a determinate of the thing in itself(…)” (“Denn alle solche historische Philosophie, (…)nimmt, als wäre Kant nie dagewesen, DIE ZEIT für eine Bestimmung der Dinge an sich (…)” Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Band I, Zürich, 1988, p. 360). Such philosophy stands still at that which Kant calls appearance and Plato “the becoming, never existing, as opposed to the existing, never becoming (…)” (“das Werdende, nie Seyende, im Gegensatz des Seyenden, nie Werdenden”, ibid.)
As if anticipating Heidegger’s concept of ‘aletheia’ or truth as an unconcealing, a revealing (this is how Heidegger defines technology as well) – Schopenhauer characterizes such historical philosophizing when “(…) driven to its last resort (as) a doctrine of constant becoming, sprouting from, arising, bringing forth to the light from darkness, from the murky ground, Ur-ground, unground and similar nonsense/gibberish (…)” (“Solches HISTORISCHES PHILOSOPHIREN liefert (…)auf den letzten Weg getrieben, (…) eine Lehre vom steten Werden, Entsprießen, Entstehen, Hervortreten ans Licht aus dem Dunkeln, dem finstern Grund, Urgrund, Ungrund und was dergleichen Gefasels mehr ist (…)”, ibid.)

Perhaps this time-fetish is just a bad leftover from the Christian ‘calendar of hope’ or oikonomia – whence the grammatical tenses (temporality itself), modelled on the passion of Christ, are deduced – birth, life, death, resurrection, salvation, the coming. Did Wittgenstein have this timetable in mind when he remarked enigmatically in paragraph 374 of The Philosophical Investigations “Welche Art von Gegenstand etwas ist, sagt die Grammatik. (Theologie als Grammatik.)” (Grammar tells you what sort of object something is. (Theology as Grammar.))

When Bloch comments at the beginning of his “Principle of Hope” (Das Prinzip Hoffnung) “Denken heißt überschreiten.” (Thinking is overstepping.), repeating it several times like a mantra – does that mean we overstep ourselves beyond our body or physical being in thought? Is it only thought, idea or mind which are moving, overstepping? Do we overstep affect or will? G. Richter translates “überschreiten” as “transgression” (see “Can Hope Be Disappointed? Contextualizing a Blochian Question in Symploke, Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2 (2006) pp. 42-54) – which suggests that body or affect are involved in this act of thinking. Perhaps a mental affair? With Oneself? Or are mind, body and affect separated in this thinking act of exceeding the limit? Does will have anything to do with Blochian hope? Or is it just thinking?

The question of ‘future’ is the question of metamorphosis or more generally of uncertainty. The imagination can transpose freely in any direction or order – unlike memory – similarly the passions. Hence says Hume imagination is central to his system of passions.
The future exists only in thought – like risk. Once it is more than thought it is no longer future. Hence the mind races along towards itself. But these thoughts are not spontaneously self-generating – they thrive on impressions, which have already been left by past experiences or sensations – and they are retarded by the immense inertia of the unconscious. Anticipation is itself a memory of anticipation. And disappointment – another word for fulfilment.

Bloch appeals to Heraclites as a guarantor of his idea of hope residing in the future – “Whoever does not hope for the unexpected cannot find it” leaving out the second part of this gnomic wisdom – “it is untraceable and remote (unapproachable)” suggesting that whatever it is which is hoped for is not of the future but something which is present and could be looked for now. It would seem the Greeks did not have such a euphoric animistic idea of the future as in the Christian West. One recognizes the same synchronistic thinking in an anecdote from the end of Book Nine of The Republic quoted by Badiou of a conversation between Socrates and his young interlocutors about his political models.
“ ‘What you tell us about politics is all well and good, but it is impossible. You cannot put it into practice.’ And Socrates replies: ‘Yes, in the city where we are born it is perhaps impossible. But perhaps it will be possible in another city.’” (Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, London, 2008, p. 69) How easy it would have been for Socrates to locate the possibility of his political ‘utopia’ in a world to come – in the coming community? But rather as Badiou concludes he implies that “every genuine politics presupposes expatriation, exile, foreignness.” (ibid.) The Chassidic perspective varies this theme slightly, transcendentally – “Chiliastic redemption was a local rumour, possibly true in the next town, never in one’s own.” ( see “Chassidic Planets” Faust Series Opus 9, 11th May 2010)

World In. World Out.

The City of London has little to do with the State. It is a state in the state. It finances bodies which resemble it – homeopathic magic is essential for the secret world economy or the world economy of secrets. These bodies and cartographies are mostly oriental – they exist in the mythical Orient of the ancient cities of finance like Tyre, Carthage and in the modern era – Genoa and Venice. The irresistible affinity between England or rather the City of London (the most ancient consolidated part of London) and the Orient is not cultural or sentimental, or only secondarily – the appetency for the Orient is financial in the old alchemical sense. But the Idea has some faint imperfect reflection in the Real – the City’s corresponding bodies are in the Middle East – in South Lebanon, parts of Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, etc. The legendary wealth of the Orient which sloshes around the City is called today ‘jihadi’ finance capital – but its origin and nature is the same as it was at the time of the telling of “Tale of the Two Dreamers” – in the reign of the caliph al-Ma’mun (A.D. 786-833) A man of great wealth from Cairo lost everything he had except his father’s house. He had to work with his hands for a living. One night exhausted he fell asleep under the fig tree in his garden and dreamt that a great fortune awaited him in Persia, in Isfahan. He set off on the dangerous and long journey – encountering pirates, idolators, wild beasts, torrentious rivers – finally arriving in Isfahan. He fell asleep in the courtyard of a mosque. On exactly that night a band of robbers were attempting to rob a neighbouring house. The family woke up and sounded alarm. The robbers escaped, but the man from Cairo was discovered and arrested. The captain of the police whipped him with a bamboo lash until he was almost dead. When he finally woke up in jail the captain sent for him and asked whom he was. The man told him his reason for coming to Isfahan. The captain laughed at his gullibility – believing in his dream. He said: “O man of little wit, thrice have I dreamed of a house in Cairo in whose yard is a garden, at the lower end of which is a sundial and beyond the sundial a fig tree and beyond the fig tree a fountain and beneath the fountain a great sum of money. Yet I have not paid the least heed to this lie; but you, offspring of a mule and a devil, have journeyed from place to place on the faith of dream.” (from the Thousand and One Nights, No. 351 quoted in Jorge Luis Borges, “A Universal History of Infamy”, London, 1975, pp. 112-3) The captain gave him a few coins for his return journey – as soon as he came home he went to his fountain and dug up the great treasure seen in the captain’s dream. “And thus Allah brought abundant blessing upon him and rewarded him and exalted him. Allah is the Beneficient, the Unseen.” (ibid.)
The Chassidim of the School of Pshiskhe tell a similar story. Except the cities are not Cairo and Isfahan – but Cracow and Prague. The time is the beginning of the 19th century or late 18th century – during the epoch of revolutionary upheaval in Europe. The Chassidic Jews in their isolation invented a story which transports the Orient and its miraculous treasure hunting of dreams to the cities of Eastern Europe. The story revolves about a poor man – not one who first lost his wealth. He is debt-ridden and worries constantly. Worries and prays. Nothing happens for a long while. “And then, one night, he had a strange dream: he saw himself swept away into a distant kingdom, inside its capital, under a bridge, in the shadow of an immense palace. And a voice told him: “This is Prague, this is the Vltava and over there, the palace of the kings. Now look and look well, for under this bridge, at the spot where you are standing, there is a treasure; it is waiting for you, it is yours. Your problems are resolved.” ” (Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire, New York, 1993, pp. 203-4) In the morning he mocks himself – but that night the dream comes again. The poor Jew Eizik resisted the dream – it was too far, he had no money, he would rather continue to pray and pray even to have his dreams exorcised. Then the dream came for a third time asking him – why he hadn’t left yet. So he started his journey to Prague on foot. The story varies the Arabian story slightly – he arrives at the prescribed destination, under the bridge, he is too timid to start digging, he prowls around so indecisively, that he is noticed by soldiers and arrested as a spy. Like in Thousand and One Nights – the man who accuses him of spying is the captain of the guards. In almost the same apologetic tone of the Arabian story teller, the Chassidic story describes the arrested Jew as too frightened to make up a story. Instead he tells the ‘truth’ (a truth according to the story) – about his dreams, his worries, the long journey from Cracow. Instead of having him shot as a liar, the “(…)dangerous captain burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that tears ran down his cheeks: “No, is that really why you came from so far away? You Jews are even more stupid than I thought! Now look at me, such as you see me here, if I were as stupid as you, if I too listened to voices, do you know where I would be at this very minute? In Cracow! Yes, you heard me correctly. Imagine that for weeks and weeks, there was that voice at night telling me: ‘There is a treasure waiting for you at the house of a Cracow Jew named Eizik, son of Yekel! Yes, under the stove! Naturally, half the Jews there are called Eizik and the other half Yekel! And they all have stoves! Can you see me going from house to house, tearing down all the stoves, searching for a nonexistent treasure?” ”, (Elie Wiesel, op. cit, p. 205) The end of the tale in Arabia and in Chassidic Galicia is the same – the traveller rushes home, moves the stove and finds the promised treasure. He pays his debts, marries off his daughters and in gratitude builds a synagogue which attests to his piety – although he is no longer poor. One of the Tzaddikim (Chassidic masters) who told this parable was Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav, who was the author of numerous ‘art’ stories or ‘maayses’. He replaced Prague with Vienna – explaining “The treasure is at home but the knowledge of it is in Vienna.” (ibid.) Reb Nahman was himself an Orient traveller – urged by a vision he embarked on a long journey to the land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) on Turkish ships, during which he engaged in mysterious and even forbidden sinful activities before returning several years later to his native Ukraine. He referred to his spiritual wanderings – as first falling so as to ascend even higher.
Going to one place is always so much more than one place – it is also all the places of which it reminds you. As you go from place to place you add to a bewildering profusion of such memories. Memory naturally longs for the past – not because it was better or for reason of indifferent nostalgia, but because one had fewer memories then, hence less bewilderment. Although memory is by nature limited to the past – it is the organ through which the past endures, so it is not surprising that an ontology based on what is to come – as in all the ‘coming communities’ must find a way to ‘interrupt’ memory.

On a certain day in Henley on Thames – three people referred to the past. A fat woman exaggerating the romance of a tawdry carousel on the Henley waterfront park lawn; a fatuous rich bargain hunter in the almost empty shell of a boutique in receivership looking at lacklustre jeans grotesquely overpriced called ‘hipsters’ – “That takes you back”; I’ve forgotten the third person, maybe it was me. Henley was a bastion of the forces of the King in the English civil war – in a certain shabby cavernous family pub plaques remind you of this allegiance. Its capacious recesses are as dark as an empty eye socket – the pub could have been a garrison in those days. Even on the narrow island, there’s always room for the troops. Not that it helped the King much – it just gives Henley a slight feeling of being a loser town. Royal Henley is especially narrow – in its historical center. The one room Almes Houses in the shadow of Henley’s Cathedral are squat and pale green. They were built for the poor – a kind of necropolis for ‘mere life’ next to the churchyard – now coveted by rentiers.

If you are loyal to life, you are disloyal to art.

I’m always attracted to the mystique of the bed-sit – like those along Henley’s waterfront. The only dignified bamboo planting I saw was there. The grasses hang lugubriously over the grey wall. Pressed in on both sides by dark bushes. The entrance is in the shadow of both. Et in arcadia ego. The sphinx like nature of all places – the fake sphinxes too.
I told the lifeguard at the swimming pool – you lead a double life. Most people lead double lives. Double lives are normal, a minimum. Music leads a double life too – it has the power to cure madness (Orpheus etc) and the power to hypnotize, to induce madness (the devil’s triller).
I escape the drumming on the hill. But Fate is inescapable. I think that my need for physical conditioning is guiding me to a swimming pool. This is merely rational self-preserving bait that the genius of my destiny holds out in front of me. As in a Talmudic story, you go to the south because you hear misfortune will come in the north, but it will follow you wherever you go. There is a north in the south as well. If only the permanent north on the compass. Rather just head east like de Nerval with amor fati in your heart.

The French moralist Jouffroy referred to England as a trading power – in the lineage of Carthage. This is somewhat deceptive – certainly it was traditionally a trading power, but this is synonymous with being a finance power – no romance without finance. Trade is always about financing future transactions. Every time one feels hemmed in – the narrowness of the island – the rooms and houses which are too small, the country roads without any footpath for the pedestrian – not even a shoulder of the road – planted with hedgerows, the railroad platforms which are so narrow one is almost swept onto the tracks by the wind and vibrations from a passing train - one has a sense of the suitable topography of a finance power.
Every hedgerow is mimicry of a castle keep built on a sheer mass of rock. Each country lane a fortress to be defended. Although the defenders are all invisible.

T.S. Eliot attests to the metaphysical allegorical nature of the hedgerow in England and as is known he worked in Lloyds Bank. That alone should show that there is some hidden line between the hedgerow and the financial cosmos (hedge funds?) – or that the hedgerow is a ‘forest of symbols’ for a philosophy of credit and debit, of bankruptcy –
“Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol (…)
(T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, online)
The mystery of Quartet no 4 “Little Gidding” owes much to this accountant’s mysticism. Perhaps all mysticisms are derived from accountancy – the number.
“There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference (…)”

The hedgerow is the street beyond the street – a mimicry of it – it shows the seasons and the lack of season – such as “the unimaginable Zero summer”. The people in their houses are the hedgerow of the hedgerow. The hedgerow blossoms white twice in the year – the snow appearing in the flush of winter and then the white awakening in spring. (Does Eliot echo Proust’s beloved hawthorn purity?) But in the hedgerow the reveilles if not false are not really to be trusted – what awakens in the hedgerow is only the dead shifting from one past life to another, as if to reinvest the remainder. The hedgerow in “Little Gidding” is more in the other life than in this one – walking along it at the end of an “interminable night” the poet catches “the sudden look of some dead master” – where they meet is an “intersection time/ Of meeting nowhere (…)” That the hedgerow is the apparition of nowhere which is also one of the world’s ends is relentlessly affirmed. The hedges are not a unique world’s end – but they are in England:
“(…)There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.”
Whatever it is that leads you this way of the hedgerows whether with purpose or without it – by day as a somnambulant wanderer or by night “like a broken king” your purposes will be altered and reversed in the timelessness of the hedgerow, where sense and notion have to be “put off” – “You are here to kneel (…)” but “here” is also “nowhere” – or there where the dead communicate. The hedgerow in its sameness, its unhidden concealment is
“Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.”

The hedgerow is a limit. It is liminal – not architecture, a living wall. It represents closure – as a principle of the narrow. It criss-crosses the countryside reminding all who look upon it of the wisdom of limits, of narrowness – the ‘goldilocks zone’ for a national body whose historical greatness was rooted in finance. This is an age-old doctrine of the trade nation – as Jouffroy notes – security is the first condition for the development of trade. “All one needs is a good port and a few acres of land which are protected from infringement – this is enough to erect the colossus – it would begin to wobble if it were placed on a broader ground, because it would be difficult to defend it.” (Théodore Jouffroy, Das grüne Heft in: Die französischen Moralisten, Band II, Bremen, 1963, p. 463) So the Idea of the City – analogous to the City of God – devoted to finance, hermetic and defensible is also in the hedgerow. Jouffroy studies this topographical constant in the genealogy of such trade and finance cities: “One studies the location of Tyre, Milet, Carthage, Corinth in antiquity. One looks at Venice, Amalfi, Genoa, England in modern times.” It seems quite natural for Jouffroy to include England in a list of city-states – for its quintessence was the City. In the same fashion Ruskin could compare England’s fading grandeur with the Byzantine Gothic decay of Venice – the rest of the country, the bulk of the land, was merely there to feed and raise soldiers to defend the City when necessary. In all these mercantile entities, the restriction of movement and the situation of being at the ‘world’s end’ predominates – Jouffroy discovers a ‘type’ a morphology of such powers from antiquity to recent history: “One will always find either a cliff or a spit or an island in the middle of water, or a narrow space, shielded by a wall of mountains or high walls on the shore.” (ibid)

Seen in this light, the City of London is a relic or fossil from the timeless epoch of such finance cities – what Genoa was for the Mediterranean or even Carthage. Carthage was a city built up mostly upon money, defended by mercenaries. Like England during its empire it was a finance ‘city’ with colonies. All non-Carthaginians owed tribute to Carthage, they had no rights. At its zenith Carthage was known as the “shining city” – ruling 300 cities around the western Mediterranean, thus undisputed master of the Phoenician world.

Throughout antiquity it was persistently rumoured that Carthaginians sacrificed children to Moloch by burning them alive. Their religion was essentially a ‘cult of the dead’. The necropolis within the structure of the ancient city was comparable in size and importance to Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof. Moloch is variously translated as the name of the demon god of death, the brass statue in which sacrifices including human sacrifices were burnt and the form of sacrifice itself. Burckhardt in his history of Greece says Carthage deserved to fall. Carthage was deeply hated in the Mediterranean – especially in Sicily. (The romance of the Carthaginian hoard lives on in Flaubert’s Salammbo most realistically. The novel takes place at a time of a revolt of the mercenaries. Flaubert spent many years on Salammbo. Even so he had to allay the doubts of the exacting critic Saint-Beuve regarding his historical accuracy and total realism, even in details such as if one can see the colors of gems by starlight.)

The sense of ‘owing’ everything for all foreseeable and unforeseeable futures to capital is older than modern capitalism – it is the anthropological ‘genetic memory’ of the abject state of owing tribute to a distant money power. Capital has inherited that spectral power – but in the case of capital the flow of tribute seems to take place automatically. Marx refers to this explicitly in his chapter on interest bearing capital in Volume III of Capital: “In its attribute of interest-bearing capital, all wealth, which can ever be produced belongs to capital and everything which it has received so far is merely an instalment towards its all-engrossing appetite. According to its inborn laws, all surplus labour, that the human race can deliver belongs to it. Moloch.” ( “In seiner Eigenschaft als zinstragendes Kapital gehört dem Kapital aller Reichtum, der überhaupt je produziert werden kann, und alles, was es bisher erhalten hat, ist nur Abschlagzahlung an seinem all-engrossing Appetit. Nach seinen eingebornen Gesetzen gehört ihm alle Surplusarbeit, die das Menschengeschlecht je liefern kann. Moloch.” Karl Marx, Das Kapital, MEW, Bd 25, Berlin, 1969, p. 410)
Although seemingly very powerful and not just seemingly, such money powers are always on the brink of extinction – not because of decline or decay – but due to the founding paradox of their existence: The need to remain small in their base – not to engage in conquest especially of land and to remain aloof from the wars and conflicts of their age. That is nearly impossible. So it is no wonder that amongst the members of this caste a certain nihilistic worldview should develop – one is not concerned with ethics – one leads an aesthetic life – in other words political.

A perfect exemplar of a ‘prince of money’ in the sense of model or type was the long serving governor of the Bank of England Montagu Norman. His reign traversed a most acute phase in the history of finance in the 20th century – from 1920 until 1944. He was the bohemian aesthete banker – a dandy in appearance with wide brimmed extravagant hats and the flourish of a Shakespearean actor. He was a kind of Wyndham Lewis or vorticist of high finance. Like him he was attracted to fascist dictatorship – which in itself is already an expression of the fragile basis of finance power – the deadly lure of the conquest of space undermining its constitutive need for restriction. As Jouffrroy writes: “Every trade (finance) power is destroyed by the acquisition of land. That is how Carthage ended, Venice and Genoa destroyed themselves in the same way. In the same way, one saw how England was shaken by its contintental interests. A finance power should have offices everywhere, never land.” (ibid.) Norman, a legendary force for disaster, is attributed with the orchestration of the great crash of 1929 together with his American and German counterparts. This may merely demonstrate his Mephistophelean image as the archetypical diabolical Banker. Recently Paul Krugman feared that “The curse of Montagu Norman” was infecting the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy. (see New York Times blogs, December 18, 2009)

Norman’s close friendship with the German central banker Schacht, later Nazi central banker dates from the period of the Crash. Certainly it is a fact that following Montagu Norman’s tenure as governor of the Bank of England the British Empire began to disappear rapidly – first in India and Palestine, followed by colonies in Africa and the Middle East. Of course Jouffroy’s view is ideal, almost purist – not pragmatic. A finance power is never just that – so when England was an ascendant power under Cromwell it sued for war. The series of the Dutch Wars between England and Holland in the 17th century undermined Dutch hegemony of the seas – which included the principle of ‘mare liberum’ for the Dutch in the “Narrow Seas” (the English Channel and the North Sea). At this time – Holland, the reigning mercantile power needed peace for its ‘miracle’ to last. England was the rough competitor with less to lose, who exposed the inevitable paradox of the trading power - “Any threat to the free movement of Dutch shipping, any constriction of maritime activity, was thus a threat to undermine the whole enormous structure of their commerce and finance, of empire and industry. War was the probable, perhaps the inevitable response. Yet here lay the paradox of the Dutch predicament. Though the country had won life and health and strength by war, war was in fact fatal to it, since war not only interfered with the free movement of ships but exposed them to capture or destruction.” (The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by R.C. Latham and W. Matthews, Volume X Companion, London, 1995, p. 111)

As the Grand Pensionary of Holland Pauw foresaw in 1752 after his efforts to avoid war failed: “the English are about to attack a mountain of gold; we are about to attack a mountain of iron.” (quoted in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, op. cit., p. 112)

Siimilar to Nietzsche’s idea of “doing damage with one’s best” – Jouffroy attributes Holland’s demise precisely to its improvement and enlargement of its land mass. When its territory was covered with water it could arouse little envy and ambition, when it drained its coast and secured its land making itself accessible and desirable, it destroyed the foundation of its power.

Norman true to both character masks – that of a ‘lord of finance’ and a representative of a declining power – the British Empire – was a radical appeaser in the thirties. Later as war became the ‘ineluctable’ – he devised a fiendish variation of appeasement. He ‘bought’ into the Nazi bid for world power – as one would advance capital for any worthy venture. A banker knows how to do this though with other people’s money. He did so in various ways but mostly conducted via the Bank for International Settlement – a bank in Basel combining the central banks of Europe and Japan. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 Norman together with his banker colleagues in the BIS acceded to the Reichsbank demand – conveyed by his friend Hjalmar Schacht - that Austria’s gold reserves (22 tons) be transferred to the Reich. Later in 1939 when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia they again demanded the gold reserves. Czechoslovakia’s gold reserves were however deposited in the Bank of England as a safe haven – but partly in a BIS account. As governor of the Bank of England Norman personally authorized the transfer of this part of Czechoslovakia’s gold reserves to the Reichsbank (6,000,000 pounds) - continuing the BIS policy of supporting the Third Reich. One could say that England the finance power (as opposed to England the nation state) bought into the Nazi venture with the gold of the Nazi-occupied countries. I wonder what happened to this gold after the war. Austria was a loser – so if it forfeited its gold – that was only par for the course. But Czechoslovakia? Did it have its gold reserve restored? It had changed geopolitical hands in the mean time – belonging to the Soviet bloc. One could imagine that prudent Western bankers would not be eager to deliver gold to that entity. Perhaps it just slipped naturally into the coffers or ‘quiet reserves’ of some allied victorious power – whence it came. One would need the divining talents of a Cagliostro or a Count of St. Germaine to figure that out. Everywhere in human affairs one is resigned to the elliptical. But we know all this, as Jean-Luc Nancy would say.

In the Time of Glue

2010-09-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

14th January 199-

Dear Mr A. B.,

What better proof could I have had that my fall from grace is no accident? It is not your fault, I am not blaming you. On the contrary you have been most kind and generous to send me your book. I thank you for it and I thank you for the inscription. How could you possibly know how your words would taunt me? It is providence laughing at me through you. I threw away my weapons and with them my caution, I am one of the damned, you are the person chosen by providence to tell me so. I see that at least I am not wrong. You are the man of the secrets. I try to run away from the forbidden subjects and discover I am running towards them. My experiments with exorcism were a miserable failure. I tried to drive out Schuster’s ghosts. Nothing sticks like his ghosts. I thought I would be unable to unglue them and I was. Your advice on how to correct a love potion is to keep on adding “chaque foi un peu plus de bave”. My exorcism foundered on too much glue. Could you perhaps explain this apparent contradiction? I think it is proper to compare these two procedures -isn’t an exorcism the inversion of an aphrodisiac as is the High Mass of the Witches’ Sabbath? Or is the one the preliminary and prerequisite for the other? Or in some other way a cause?

You can believe me, even if it sounds like I’m bragging, but I am seldom wrong about misfortune, especially my own.
“Mais moi je ne veux rire á rien
Et libre soit cette infortune.” (Rimbaud, Fêtes de la patience)

I have a toothache, from chewing slowly on thistles, or maybe from another unknowable cause, all my teeth feel too long, maybe there are white sticky patches in my mouth still invisible to the naked eye. How I long for dryness on this damp island. Where anything you touch, sticks to you. The moment it goes dry however the ground turns into something like a Persian Kawir, that geological freak consisting of part brittle salt desert tenuously covering the other part - sheer bottomless morast, where once were limpid blue seas, several worlds ago. When crossing it one false move and you’re a goner. In certain places though the kawir is so hard you can’t break up the ground enough to bury a body. That’s what it’s like here in a drought when the water company just turns off the water, pale rust spots like stigmata appear at the bottom of the bath tub, the lawns get jaundice, the train tracks and signal boxes turn to glue.

I had to give up my exorcism experiments because the ghosts were multiplying faster than before my intervention. Ghosts are very unstable by nature, as volatile in certain respects as ammonia, but without its solubility in water. Any interference with their reproductive organs does nothing to either halt or alter their rapid metamorphoses. And if my tamperings did do anything to the substance of the subsequent generations, I had no way of discovering what it was. I am still unwilling to completely abandon my theories and am waiting for a more frigid ghost to come along in order to put them into practice. One cannot drive out ghosts as one would pull out hair. One cannot leave in the middle like a bad play (Cicero). They are composed of a wet matter and are petered out, phlegmatic without springiness or courage. This phenotype led me to the comparison of ghosts with Scythians, whose racial characteristics were recorded by Hippocrates: “...because of their torpor and dampness they can neither bend the bow nor shoulder their spears.” Could these be the same Scythians who outwitted Darius? Although little is known about Scythians, even less is known about ghosts. So I thought I could apply the scant information I gleaned from Hippocrates to my efforts to rid Schuster of his ghosts. Had I known Herodotus then I would have most likely been discouraged from the start which leads me to think that anything including ignorance which helps one to overcome one’s hereditary indolence must be counted to virtue. But does not my hereditary indolence predispose me to match my wits and laziness with that of the ghosts? It is precisely their natural sloth and utter lack of enterprise which makes them so difficult to throw out. They are not of the salutary group of “les choses qui sont très-usées, mais qui séduisent cependant” (Baudelaire, Le Monstre ou Le Paranymphe d’une Nymphe Macabre) of which amulets, talismen and fetishes are made. They belong instead to that wearisome group of things one cannot get rid of, or which keep coming back, the old Ring of Polycrates mill.

Ghosts are naturally sticky. They leave most unwillingly a place to which they have become accustomed. They would rather forego new conquests than change their habits. They hate draughts and like pillows and are almost always on the verge of dying of thirst, being nine tenths liquid. They prefer a human ground which has become soft and muddy from their burrowings and shy away from biting their way through a human rock not friable from years of being rubbed at by ghosts’ teeth. Ghost teeth are dull, they mash their food rather than chew it. One of the best means of driving them out is fire, either the stake or a slower process of drying out, also known as smoking. The size loses its adhesiveness and the next wave of good fortune can sweep it off one’s person. Fire is a hazardous generally fatal method when used against ice ghosts, there is a grave danger of flooding. If one is quite desperate and chooses to employ this method despite the acknowledged dangers, then it is mandatory to take certain precautions.

One hammers four poles cut from poplars, skinned of their bark so as to be quite bony in color, into the ground. An elliptical ditch is dug at a distance of 6.66 meters from the end poles, the depth of the ditch is twice that number. One lays the fire between the poles and ditch, nine fires in all, the number of fires and poles combined being thirteen, the sum of which is again four. The great thaw which then takes place collects in the ditch or moat, one must keep the fires going forty day and forty nights, feeding it with hard wood, preferably seasoned ash, for after the thaw one cannot delay calcination. Otherwise the thawed ghosts will merely freeze over again and everything will have been in vain.
Another method which to my knowledge has never been tried is to disguise a bed as a sleigh. Ghosts are held at bay by sleds but they adore beds. They would probably run away from sleds like the horses of the Lydians ran away from the camels of Cyrus. Horses cannot stand the sight or smell of camels. Did Darius think about the antipathy of horses towards camels when he challenged the Scythians, the silent horsemen of the steppes, to meet him face to face? But as Scythian warriors seldom stepped out of the saddle, the only consequence of a rendezvous on a battlefield of the conventional sort would have been that their horses would have run away unless the Persians would have come on foot which is not very likely.

The powder obtained by calcination is of an extraordinary dryness, its tough little granules are almost insoluble, quite amazing considering the wetness of the source. When burned it gives off a lovely violet phosphorous light but the odor is as foul as bone glue. A few specks of it when scattered over a rose bush in full bloom can cause it to wither within moments, its desiccating powers when used upon humans are no less potent, the powder can cause you to age by twenty years as quickly as the plant withers, but the effects wear off eventually.

All of this is useless if one is unable to construct the ghost flute. The ghost flute is a long pipe connecting the ghost carrier and the moat. The individual who is to be freed of his ice ghosts must remain in a hole 6.66 meters deep dug between the two innermost posts. He must slide into the hole by means of a chute, lying flat on his belly, dressed in a garment open in the back, his head muffled in a thick towel to protect it upon impact. The chute may be strewn with talcum powder to break the fall. He must stay in the hole for at least seven days, the time of creation, the minimum duration for any act of destruction. He must be kept semi-conscious being stunned by a blow to the head periodically by an attendant upon the ceremony. The attendant also puts a ghost cake in his hand, bait for the ghosts. The attendant comes and goes by means of a ladder which he always removes after concluding his ministrations. The ghost flute is a long tubular object made of human bones glued at the joints by a paste obtained from ghosts of the highest viscosity. To preserve the natural resins, one must employ a particular method of destruction called the number comb. The resins are vital for the prevention of any leakage along the ghost flute — as they will not dissolve in water. The number comb is a very good tool for cutting ghost throats. They are many-throated, are in general more throat than anything else, full of slime. The comb is alternatively called the pearl and claw.

Solitary numbers are hurled at the ghosts, the numbers thereby turn into hooks, the ghosts are caught on the hooks, their liquid (the size) drips out. It is dark and syrupy reminiscent in color and texture of elderberry jam. There is nothing much one can do with it except bury it in a deep cave, disguise the opening, roll a boulder in front of it. You throw the number comb with the same hand movement you would use to draw a sickle through tall grass, the position of the rest of the body is most similar to the one necessary to swing a golf-club - the same corkscrew turning of the hips. Except in the case of the number comb you let your tool fly from your hand. At the moment of casting the number comb the exorcist should urge his instrument on with the words from Lucile’s Air: “Tout ce qui peut toucher une âme” and at the moment when the comb penetrates a ghost throat with the words from Lucile’s Ariette: “Au bien suprème, Helas, je touchais si près” (Lucile, André Modeste Grétry) The mass which remains is comprised of their thick wet glossy shells out of which one can knead a dough, similar to the bread won from the shells of the fruit of the pontikon tree by the baldheaded inhabitants of the most barren part of the Scythian territory, described by Herodotus. They called the juice of the bean aschy and drank it with milk, but the ghost “aschy” one could only feed to crocodiles and vultures in lieu of fresh cadaver meat.

The shells from which the ghost flour is ground are like the “transparent sloughed skins of the cicada which fall from them in the summer”. (Lucretius, V, 803) The ghost dough is used to make the cake and to stick the parts of the ghost flute together. The dough isn’t really such a good glue, about as sticky to touch as the green sepals covering the buds of the Moss Rose. It also leaves a smell on your fingers. The dough rots very quickly and loses its value as a putty hence if the dough one has managed to procure is of older vintage one must add an organism from the group of phyla called for convenience Invertebrata, from this the subkingdom Protozoa, in the class of Mastigophora (Flagellata), out of the order Euglenoidina called the Copromonas Subtilis. (please see enclosed sheets) It will hold the mass together, acting as a surrogate binder, replacing the ghost glue, which has evaporated. Both are in essence starches. The Copromonas Subtilis possesses the additional quality of being a poison for ghosts, who mistake its starches for those of humans. Starch against starch, glue against glue! The ghost flute through which the ghost sludge flows, pulled down by the force of gravity into the moat through a drain in the bottom of the purification chamber is so called because of the sighing tone which they make as they are flushed down, compared by some who have heard it to the noise of dolphins.

Drastic changes of climate and location are also harmful for ghosts. Shaking them and knocking them about decimates them as well. It deprives them of their potency, just as, according to Hippocrates, the lifetime spent by Scythians in the saddle mortified their sexual drives.

When I did my experiments I hadn’t yet heard of Greek Fire, one of the most terrible of siege weapons, used by the Byzantines successfully against the Saracens in the siege of Constantinople 668—675, also bravely but unsuccessfully by the Turks against the Crusaders in the siege of Acre. Water wouldn’t dowse that fire, it would only spread it about. No one knows till this day precisely what it was made of, possibly some composition of sulphur, naptha and quicklime. If anything, it was a chemical wedding, equally gruesome on sea and on land, “the crucible in which that which is can marry that which is not.” (James K. Baxter, Morning in Jerusalem) I’m still a little afraid to try Greek Fire on the ghosts. Pascal says what was once weak will never be strong. I don’t usually believe him, but in this case I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.

May I please ask you another question, as you know so much about the properties and uses of glue, is there any glue able both to “hold nothing and let nothing go”?

I send you all my best wishes,

Agréez, je vous prie, les assurances de la haute considération avec laquelle, j’ai l’honneur d’être, monsieur, votre très-obligé serviteur (…)

Here may be the beginning and end of an explanation...

2010-09-18T04:19:00.000-07:00

31st December 199-

Dear Mr A. B.,

I am writing to you Sir because I thought you might be able to help me find something I have lost. Your face and your Portrait in Le Monde des Livres (29th December 199-) seemed to be beckoning me to seek your advice. What I have lost is my inner voice, my δαιμονιον.

I feel utterly adrift since then and disarmed for my voice used to warn me away from the forbidden subjects. It also told me to write certain letters which under no circumstances should be dispatched. The sound of the voice was musical after a fashion, like a strident yet barely audible note played on the violin in the manner called flautato or ponticello. Since losing this voice I am slowly turning into something, but I don’t know what. Hopefully not a red-eyed bitch like Hecuba, a condition possibly curable by sulphur. In other words happy?

You may very well be asking yourself why I have chosen you as a confident. One reason — it is the time of oracles. But you are a stranger. For a certain school of prophecy this can only recommend you. The ancient Greeks thought that the first sentence one would hear after leaving the temple precincts, could be taken as an oracle. Or as Cicero said, some birds seem to have been put on earth exclusively for the business of divination. But although you are a stranger for me, you are certainly no stranger for the forbidden subjects, having dealt in them for so long. As Emerson wrote - life consists of what a man is thinking of all day. What is thinking but a tissue of explanations, excuses and apologies?

I have tormented myself with my own questions. I have lost all the explanations. Forever. I have been thinking about the soul. About the Immortality of the Soul. What is the soul made of if not the sum total of all possible explanations. When the explanations go missing, the soul goes with it. It lies in the nature of explanations, that in the search for one explanation one devises other ones in the meanwhile as stand-ins, so that with one and the same swing, the originally sought after explanation (whereby seeking is equal to building) is raised and at the same time demolished. The search for explanations is a building through destroying in an unending act of substituting the one for the other. Every time an old explanation dies (for though the soul is immortal, the explanation of which it is fabricated is not) one must have already made sure that a new one is growing up in its place, that is the transmigration of the explanations, the Maleficent Force will always try to kidnap an explanation for his own purposes.

He cannot invent his own explanations, he cannot destroy them either, contrary to popular opinion, neither creation nor destruction lie within his power. What he’s exceedingly good at is all sorts of alterations of any given explanation, almost any kind of distraction, subtraction, dissection, contraction, convulsions, dilutions, stagnations, inversions and conversions etc but stopping just short of total annihilation.

This is an act reserved for the native forces of the soul itself. The Harmful Force is unhappy when the soul destroys its own explanation without having provided a replacement, he is as dependent as the soul upon an unceasing supply. The annihilation of an explanation by the soul is actually the soul’s most drastic means of saving itself, it rescues itself to death. A sort of auto-da-fé of the soul.

That is why, the Hindering One is always a helper, he wants to prohibit eternally the egress of the soul along this final escape route. He helps the soul believe that there’s plenty of life still left in an explanation, no matter what stage of raw putrefaction it may have already reached. This is a technique requiring radical skill and maximum effort from the Maleficent One. It is also not without its risks.
The sort of persuading which then goes on is not done with words. We have no words for this act. The Evil One must give up some of its own living pulp to the dead explanation by irreversible transfer, it must deplete part of its own reserve, which though great is finite, to preserve in general a source thereby no less extinct. It creates a sudden blast of heat by boiling itself down at an unaccustomed rate, such that the dead explanation flickers one more time as if with its own light.

Not only does this procedure show the mastery of the Great Reducer, it is not without its own sombre heroism. But it is also the time when the Evil Force comes into its own, really deserving of the name given it by Kant, “das radikale Böse”. Only then can it enter upon the hazardous course which involves suspending the capability of the soul to nurture new explanations. It must have come to the conclusion that without this last resort, the soul would slip out of its grip altogether, dropping away into the Indefinite. This is a highly dangerous season for das radikale Böse. One can truly say of it that it undergoes a metamorphosis, comparable say to the male salmon when it swims upstream to breed. It turns a brilliant red, gets a humpback, its jaw changes into a sort of hook like weapon (so called Habsburg chin), deadly against the enemy of the female, but totally useless for feeding itself. Something like that happens, to das radikale Böse. Only by pawnbroking its own flesh can it hope to unnaturally sustain a clinically dead explanation, giving to it all the compression of a life by artificial means.

The soul does something similar when revising the body of its own explanation. It doesn’t like to squander an explanation, it lavishes great attention upon the details of its construction, the principles of soul economy would never permit it to abandon an explanation except in extremis; contrary to the impression I may have created, this does not happen as often as one might think. Unfortunately, precisely this circumspect behavior of the soul, virtuous in itself, can lead to the most terrifying Doppelgängertum between the genuine work of the soul and the labors of das radikale Böse. How is one to know as a soul who exactly is working on the prolongation of the life of an explanation and if the explanation hasn’t already in reality passed away and is merely being respirated by the life will of the evil force. This is the uncertainty which accompanies and infiltrates the life of any soul.

I was also once keen to learn about things I don’t know from books, for example I always wondered where Pascal and Thérèse of Lisieux procured those embarrassing but necessary items like the spiked belt or the barbed undershirt so essential for their spiritual hygiene. I think I found a possible source near the end of the final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. Jupien, by this time in charge of M. de Charlus’ ‘hotel’, obtained similar equipment for M. de Charlus and his clientele from naval suppliers. The most punishing regimes are on ships.

What I really would be interested to find out from an experienced horticulturist like yourself is why you raise snails on your balcony? Similar to most English gardeners, I am praying for a really bitter winter, a generous application of north and east winds from Siberia, the only ones which really howl down the chimney, drying out everything in their path but also hopefully afflicting a holocaust upon the snails. As the English say, snails are always with us, like the poor, I may be conventional, but why bother to cultivate them?

Do you bring them indoors in the winter? Forgive me for my curiosity,

Best regards,
Respectfully yours (…)

Undoing Clinamen (Of Community)

2010-09-10T16:46:00.000-07:00

An Idea has no sex and no face.

1. Dasein-Gravity

Why Facebook – why not Armbook or Teethbook? The implication is that through the face one becomes recognisable – yet the first question is “not the x you were looking for?” or “Wrong x? Search for others”. So recognising can also mean recognising as ‘not the one’ – not as the one – also implying there are a limited amount of names (one could have called it Namebook – mimicking Lloyd’s Names) but a less limited amount of faces, putting a name to a face is now putting a face to a name. But the face is only a point of departure for other faces – following the Heraclitean principle – the stream of ‘friends’ clustering around each face is constantly changing. The friends of the face lead you further and further away from the initial face – and for each face and its friends it is the same. And yet this is not a random progression or succession – because the Facebook lines never progress, they just go on – the random wandering through a crowd which might seem similar is counteracted by the mathematical probabilities of the revolving groups. Behind the faces are not names nor names behind faces – but numbers – and a kind of set theory governing the building of groups. One face appears with eight other faces at a time called friends – each friend instigates another group possibly but not necessarily containing the starting face. This reflects the non-reciprocity (presumably) of those volatile tenuous friend relations – but this unreliable friend relation is a mathematical necessity for the Facebook configuration (the indefinite quasi-infinite mazurka, quadrille of Facebook) to go on endlessly. It is the ‘clinamen’ effect – that Epicurean inclination of the atom – without which there would be neither change nor sets. Even the non-reciprocity or defriending is essential (mathematically speaking) – to give fresh impetus to clinamen. Otherwise it would get stuck in one tilt. This would create Face-Blocs – the numbers alias faces must continuously move to circulate. As the French court preacher Bossuet said, life must circulate, life must change hands. Thus instinctively Web guardians such as certain Technorati editors feel compelled – the inner voice of the number – to urge Facebook members to defriend. Unloading the ballast of previous clinamens is the only way to guarantee the life force of clinamen itself. Human ‘emotions’ or ‘affects’ are the necessary drivers of the number game. When one unchooses a Facebook friend one is promoting ontological ecology at the atomic level of the universe.

Clinanem, a concept originating in the atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius, is a function of the law of indeterminacy in the universe. Without it nothing would ever happen let alone be created in the persistent rain of atoms into the abyss. Clinamen induces collision – stress – rupture – all the generative acts. But each swerve towards the other atom is necessarily a swerve away from another point – one act of clinamen constructs and deconstructs at the same time. It is also something like ‘free will’ on the atomic level – the will to the unexpected – such as revolt.

Clinamen is, for Jean-Luc Nancy, a metaphor for the submission or ‘inclining’ of the atom-individual towards “community”. Even more - “Community is at least the clinamen of the “individual”.” (“The Inoperative Community” in: The Inoperative Community, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. 3-4) The atom uses its free will to join itself to an entity in which it will cease to be an “individual” – like in Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz” – the atom qua magic bullet has one shot to hit its mark. The principle of clinamen in ancient atomism serves rather to individuate the otherwise indistinguishable atom – in Nancy’s doctrine of community the atom’s clinamen is a retreat from its “immanence” – its autarchic absolute self. Afterwards in Nancy’s interpretation the atom forfeits all its elasticity of self – it is only an indistinguishable part of “community”. The ‘atom’ seems to have transformed itself discreetly in Nancy’s interpretation into an alias of Heidegger’s Dasein – the “community” into the Volksgemeinschaft. Clinamen is the socio-genetic act of communal absorption – the atom moves ‘outside’ of itself and ‘inside’ something greater than itself – community. Once inside there is no egress. But community is more than just an aggregate of atoms – it is a principle of non-immanence, of always being outside of oneself – or as Nancy following Heidegger says – of ecstasy.
Oddly though the individual or atom occupies at least two positions in relation to community – its clinamen in some way is a ‘pre-historical’ or primeval act of creation and at the same time the individual-atom is merely the abstract result of the “decomposition” of community.
This would mean though that community is primary – a view certainly favored by Nancy. In this second version community would have ‘preceded’ the individual historically and metaphysically – the atom would not have ‘composed’ it originally by its one and only act of clinamen. The individual is merely a part of the unravelling of community, a passive fruit of its degeneration or decadence. But then the atom’s clinamen would have been made redundant. Unless one could assume hypothetically that a pre-existing community, whose formation is ontologically given or apriori, would have been shattered in an equally remote time. The remnants of this primeval cataclysm, its diaspora, re-gather in a secondary act of clinamen, each on its own, into a new imperfect body. Such a sequence resembles the Kabbalistic concept of the ‘breaking of the vessels’. Although Nancy insists that actually community never was – so that it cannot have been lost, the feelings of loss are only nostalgia for a chimera – perhaps the “inoperative” community implies some similar idea of an original shattering of community, which if it subsequently existed then only in an inferior haphazardly reconstructed form.

Whatever platform of reality community qua being occupies it is apparent, that Nancy continuously wavers between these several versions of the relation between community and individual. But perhaps these are not really versions – rather Nancy’s implicit recognition that the individual or atom does not just swerve once. That clinamen is not a finite singular act – but a principle of motion in the universe. Otherwise he would be condemning the atom to its remaining skewered in its one and only swerve forever – the world would turn to stone eternally, history would vanish. But obviously the principle of clinamen – one of abrupt change of course, a kind of random suddenness, with no final destination – can not be a one-off. It would become something absolutely contingent and uncertain as a principle - if it happens once it can happen countless times. If the atom can incline itself toward – it can equally incline itself away from a point – this is what happens when bodies cleave abruptly or disintegrate over time – on a social empirical level friendships break, love dies, empires collapse, saturation points of all kinds are reached. Even bankruptcy can be seen as the negative clinamen of the atomic workings of the ‘community’ of Capital. As a devout Heideggerian Nancy finds it difficult to conceive of ontological moves ‘away’ from a point – so many of Heidegger’s terms include the move towards – for instance being-towards-death, being-with, all kinds of fusional modes. Even ‘falling’ (Verfallen Sein) is at least a move towards a kind of abyss – an ontological surrender to the force of Dasein-gravity. Falling is something Dasein endures or experiences – falling happens to Dasein rather than Dasein doing it. “But singularity never has the nature or the structure of individuality. Singularity never takes place at the level of atoms, those identifiable if not identical identities; rather it takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable. It is linked to ecstasy: one could not properly say that the singular being is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has no “subject” – but one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the singular being.” (“The Inoperative Community” op. cit. pp. 6-7)

Nancy’s aporia - how to think being-away within a system of thought premised on being-toward – in other words passive (willless, inoperative?) happenings and spatial (static) finite concentration? The atom is finally deprived of its clinamen, its power of movement or acceleration, its deviation from the line. An intermediate level of “singularity” is inserted between the atom and its clinamen. Clinamen is. For a Heideggerian thinking clinamen is thus ‘logically’ an empty magnetism with only one pole – only attracting never repelling. Perhaps the new Facebook atom is rather willed and aimless, than will-less and predestined for community like the old Heideggerian atom cum Dasein (singularity) Nancy is intent on memorializing.

Still if clinamen as the founding act of community happens only once, then Nancy’s concept of community would require the abolition of chance – but in the words of Mallarmé – no throw of the dice can abolish chance.
Degrees of ecstasy: How to distinguish between the ecstasy of Being = Community and the ecstasy of fusion? Is there a gradient from one to the other? An elevation? The path of excess? Of failure? Of betrayal?

2. Unbuilding

Rural spots are dedicated to keeping the accident alive. To observe world history or the cosmos for that matter from the rural unbuilt areas is to be in a permanently arrested clinamen – or in a continuous eccentric semi-revolution. Rural in this case is also peripheral. One turns away from rural apparent emptiness and at the same time towards metropolitan apparent fullness. Neither are quite what they seem. But the uneventfulness of the rural area seems to imply it has dropped out or away from historical causality – from any causality, which does not originate in the city. The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt Henry Morgenthau wanted to turn defeated Nazi Germany into one big farm or cabbage patch – his plan was not realised. Although some areas of East Germany have slipped into such a re-ruralisation on their own – Eisenhüttenstadt, Nordhausen even parts of Berlin to name a few. It is the power of the physical land itself in absence of a human constructive will which carries out any process of decivilization. In Eisenhüttenstadt for instance – the bureaucratic will is not absent but mostly deconstructive. Entropy and the negative human plan coincide. The Eisenhüttenstadt Blog nostalgically documents the progress of demolition – posting photographs of the pieces of brick and mortar falling from the crumbling facades of hotels on the main street (potentially striking the passers-by), of empty apartment blocks with the caption – this is now a flat field. The photographic remains of every area of still erect built space looking picturesque in the setting sun or painted over with graffiti, just sunlight itself pouring through an empty unnaturally wide street, even cracked tiles where once a statue of the unicorn, the city mascot, stood are cherished like heirlooms.
The same demolishing power chewing up Eisenhüttenstadt lurks in any semi-unbuilt rural area as the constant stochastic force of the original wasteland. The wilderness is the perpetual intermittent event of any rural space.
There is a power in degeneracy – it is the power of undoing. As Nancy writes – “The relation (the community) is, if it is, nothing other than what undoes, in its very principle – and at its closure or on its limit – the autarchy of absolute immanence.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit. p. 4)

One night after watching “Blade-Runner” we stepped out into the night of true nihilism – the empty streets of a ‘spectral suburb’ like village on the Thames. What we soon saw made “Blade-Runner” seem like an optimistic heart-warming film – all those buildings in good repair, enterprising agents, streets teeming with extras – civilization is in full flower. How much more horror is presented by the unevents of sheer living – outside of any plot or pattern. Or if any pattern – then only the traces of clinamen. Such an unauthored unevent accosted our eyes from which the film images were rapidly fading – we saw as we approached the old people’s flats on the outskirts of what is itself an outskirt, that something there had been quite deranged. It turned out to be their boundary wall or what was left of it. The walls in front of the old people’s flats had been semi-razed – unbuilt in various unrelated ways. Columns twisted around and knocked over, bricks plucked out and partially crushed down – one wonders how it could have taken place without interference, how many hands were working on it. Were they enchanted? But in particular – the treatment of the hedges was astonishing. The privet seemed turned inside out and axed through and flayed. “Mon cœur repose sous ces débris (…)” (Gerard de Nerval)

Unremarkable scenes are the accident in its dormant state – the sparsely furnished mimicry (mimesis) of the void. Its truth, the accident, lies on the surface although in abeyance. ‘Aletheia’ appears in suspension.
The more characterless it is, the more indistinguishable from other scenes, the more the spot lies in ambush. This is a principle of natural sham – its mimicry or ruse is always based on some kind of heightened normality – one is instinctively on one’s guard against the ‘normal’.

Return to the scene of the accidents, the riverbank. The rains have softened down the meadow especially at the stile, closest to the river. The mud is so whipped up and smooth I almost slip. A lady walking her dog might have seen me sliding around. As I came to the stile crossing she spoke to me from the other side: Last winter a lady broke her leg here, one would have thought they would have put down some gravel.
I: Yes it’s very slippery.
The woman could have been one of those guardians of the rivers from the English legends – those who half warn, half frighten the traveller into his doom. They are human abstractions of the landscape – a remnant of the old pagan economy of sacrifice. A primitive or prototype of the exchange relation. The victim of the river is offered in exchange for the prosperity of the community – but it is a self-activating ritual happening by chance. The murderous rivers are often spoken of as ‘she’. The locals living around the river Dart on the edge of Dartmoor have heard ‘her’ cry. Of the Dart it is said: The Dart, the Dart – the cruel Dart
Every year demands a heart…

The woman probably wanted to sound sympathetic, but it came out as a kind of threat or curse. The logic behind it, places known to have their built in natural menace should be preserved, protected like sacred sites, and left untouched. It also happened to be the closest point to the river’s edge. One could just as easily slip down into the water as break one’s leg on the riverbank.
I: I didn’t feel like wearing my wellies.
She: Although you needed them.
Errors of judgement are good introductions to the accident.

The friendliness of a secret enemy can only be the working of the evil eye. Roy, the retired mechanic, looked too inquisitively at me when asking me how I am. I said: Very well thank you. Two hours later I had the flu. The mechanical evil eye works especially well at a distance. His former partner who now runs the garage together with a Caliban assistant whose face is so disfigured I have never dared to look at him (I know it only by hearsay) operate in the same fashion. They count on weather and natural forces to set their contraptions in motion. Timing doesn’t matter. They are not in a hurry.

3. Caves

In the story “The Immortal” by Borges troglodytes play an important part. They are a valuable literary fixture – cave dwellers, ancient geography – mentioned in Montesquieu’s “Lettres Persanes” – also in Flavius. Troglodytes are the children of Abraham by a wife after the death of Sarah. The natural inclination in the garden is also the formation of caves – another proof of the essential correspondence between the vegetable and mineral in nature. The vegetable caves are dark damp places made by plants growing on top of plants, piling up roofs of foliage upon armatures of branches. The natural ‘geodesic’ forms are produced by the struggle of plants for hegemony. Plants are cave producers if not cave dwellers. Is this the will in plants? According to theories of metempsychosis this ‘will’ comes from souls on their restless cycle of transmigration now inhabiting the plant. Mme de Staël quotes Schubert’s philosophy of plant will. Schopenhauer incorporates these ideas of will in non-human creatures or entities into his general philosophy of will, although he has only scorn for Schubert’s “Symbolik des Traumes” (Symbolism of Dreams). Nietzsche wrote disapprovingly of Schopenhauer’s obsession with will: “ 127. Schopenhauer, mit seiner Annahme , dass Alles, was da sei, nur etwas Wollendes sei, hat eine uralte Mythologie auf den Thron gehoben;(…)” (Fröhliche Wissenschaft, München, 1988, p. 483) (Schopenhauer, with his assumption, that everything which is here, can only be something which wills, placed an ancient mythology on the throne;(…)). Obviously Nietzsche excludes himself from those elevating will to the cause exclusively at work in the universe.
When the neighbour’s startling burglar light strikes the Scots pine it looks like an ancestral tower. The garden skyscraper. Same old will. The spiders stretch their tripwires from bush to bush – the tips of the Berberis and the rose are oddly tilted – but the will isn’t theirs. Determined appearances are in this case most false – the determination is hiding in the spider.

The race of cave dwellers lived in Arabia Felix, on the African Red Sea coast – those children of Abraham mentioned by Flavius. They were said to have lead the Turks down secret passages in times of war. Borges uses all of these attributes (elements) in his story. The narrator finds the semi-conscious stupefied troglodyte waiting for him like a loyal dog ready to lead him back out of the labyrinth away from the City of the Immortals. The City was so perversely constructed so as to ensure a permanent noisome presence of evil in the universe, polluting past and future, even threatening the stars. Somehow Borges hints that this City might be a parable for the City of London – especially the part around the Barbican. The story starts in London – the frame is a manuscript found in a set of Pope’s Iliad sold to a Princess of Lucinges by an antique dealer. The year is 1929, the year of the Great Crash. The caves are in London too – the underground, the tunnels.

4. Fascist Communion

Nancy shows himself through the eyes of Bataille. Bataille is an authentic witness of fascism – he lived through the distressing period, which Nancy calls the “mortal conflagration of ecstasy”. In Nancy’s text “The Inoperative Community” - it is Bataille’s swaying one is led to see - between the “poles of community and ecstasy”, a rhythm dictated by an age in which these poles of transgression were what was then “being-in-common”. In the course of this swaying, community and ecstasy and being change places frequently as another player – sovereignty - appears and disappears.
Sovereignty in Bataille as one understands from Nancy’s reading of Derrida’s reading of Bataille is an intrusion from Bataille’s lifelong preoccupation (obsession) with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Derrida refers to Bataille’s “unreserved Hegelianism” – considered by both Nancy and Derrida to be a weakness or at least a limit of his text. Sovereignty is what prevents Bataille from quite completely abandoning or condemning the subject as ‘unreservedly’ as Nancy does. The subject is sovereign – although at the same time “Sovereign is NOTHING.”. (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit., p. 18) Sovereign is the master – his truth though is finally the slave’s consciousness. This was Hegel’s never-ending scandal for Bataille. Community and ecstasy – is that one possible translation of slave and master?

Bataille’s eye only opens at his own peril – to see is to die. The Medusa curse of consciousness. Some of this danger hovers over Nancy’s text – or does he just set up zones where it might land without possessing the death-defying consciousness of the Hegelian master, but rather the consciousness of the self-preserving slave – so that the angel of death just passes over?

For Bataille ‘sovereignty’, if not superior to community – at least exists on another plane. Out of an experience of disappointment with all “communitarian projects” of his time, the “betrayal of communism” and his “fascination with fascism” or “fascist orgiastics” – Bataille detaches sovereignty from anything ‘common’ and allots it to those living in “accursed isolation” – lovers and the artist. Only they seem to be resistant to the fusion of community and its fascist orgy. Here though ecstasy deserts community for sovereignty. Sovereignty as embodied in the sovereign isolation of lovers or the artist is ecstatic. “Now (…) it was impossible for him (Bataille sm) to link forms of sovereignty — or ecstasy — to the egalitarian community, indeed to community in general. These forms — essentially the sovereignty of lovers and that of the artist, the one and the other and the one in the other set apart from the orgiastics of fascism, but also from communist equality — could not but appear to him as ecstasies (…) without any hold (…) on the community into which they nonetheless had to be woven, arealized, or inscribed, (…)” (Nancy, “The Inoperative Community” op. cit., p. 20) Such a sovereignty of lovers and the artist seems to have survived at least as a fading memory in the relation of no relation postulated by Badiou as the amorous “scene of two” or in his designating art as one of the other four truth processes – similar to the truth processes science and love – at least these three potential loci of truth-events occur in antagonistic isolation from any sort of being-with. Badiou unlike Nancy is precisely concerned with the unearthing of new subjects of truth – more or less corresponding to truth processes. The 4th truth process – politics – seems to undermine though Badiou’s typology of ‘sovereign’ subjects – who is the subject of the truth of politics – the sovereign or the ‘community’?
(see Spectres of Heidegger at Birkbeck, Faust Series Opus 9, 3rd August 2010)

It is not just Bataille’s swaying one sees in Nancy’s text – Nancy himself is suspended between the same two poles of community and ecstasy – never sure in which direction he is moving at any given moment. He is like the Tarot figure of the hanging man – who hangs open eyed from his feet from a gallows – acutely cognizant (“the clear consciousness of the communal night”) of all his surroundings, but unable to come to a clear decision about the multitude of details presenting themselves to his upside-down fixed gaze.
“(…)the paradox of a thinking magnetically attracted toward community and yet governed by a theme of the sovereignty of a subject. For Bataille, as for us all, a thinking of the subject thwarts a thinking of community.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit., p. 23)

Why is being-in-common in Nancy’s sense antithetical to sovereignty? Isn’t being-in-common already sovereign according to Nancy in that it is that entity to which ‘singular being’ is exposed or abandoned, just as it is to any other form of sovereignty except that in the case of being-in-common sovereignty presents itself directly as finitude? Being-in-common is both that which presents itself in finitude and the ‘court’ – the law – to which being-in-common is presenting – where it has its “hearing”. Community as law is sovereign toward being-in-common as finitude – passing judgement on finite singular beings. Is the judgement of community as law not a subject? A work? Is that not an immanent circularity of being-in-common?

In fact, it is a paralysis or circularity of thought, which Nancy is describing, (equivalent to his bizarre idea of an atomless clinamen), a motionless movement, a trembling standstill in the text – circling around something he cannot quite phrase (nor not phrase) – but alternately touching community, ecstasy, death, extermination. In a kind of confession - he semi-discloses a chaste Christian lust for the fascist excess – what he refers to as fascist orgiastics. Speaking of Bataille and “several others” Nancy refers to their “fascination with fascism inasmuch as it seemed to indicate the direction (…) of an intense community, devoted to excess. (…) Fascism was the grotesque or abject resurgence of an obsession with communion; it crystallized the motif of its supposed loss and the nostalgia for its images of fusion. In this respect, it was the convulsion of Christianity, and it ended up fascinating modern Christianity in its entirety.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit. p. 17)

One wonders what that is - ‘fascist orgiastics’ – the granite blocks of party slaves at the Nuremberg Parteitag waiting with one bated breath for the word of ‘communion’ from their master? That does not look like an orgy. An orgy has to do with touching, saturnalia – the kiss and coitus of the masses. The communal orgy must in some way mimic the joy of lovers. Once again one of Nancy’s paradoxes exposes itself as the inner ressentiment of the text towards ‘being’ which would evade the law alias community, ‘being’ which is not abandoned to that law. “Community is given to us – or we are given and abandoned to community: a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be done or produced.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit., p. 35) And as such – this community, a gift, which you cannot even give back if you wanted to (although Esposito more a realist will speak of how to become immune to this gift) – has its ways of resisting what in turn resists its gift of itself: “Community is, in a sense, resistance itself: namely, resistance to immanence. (…) (resistance to the communion of everyone or to the exclusive passion of one or several: to all the forms and all the violences of subjectivity).” (ibid.)

“Lovers form the extreme though not external limit of community.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit., p. 38) (Nancy imitates and undermines Bataille’s partiality for lovers). But lovers in Nancy’s view merely demonstrate ecstasy for the benefit of community – they set a sort of standard of sharing between ‘singular beings’ (not subjects), which the community can easily appropriate. This does not occur as a matter of course – but it is community’s potential. Because although between lovers is where “ecstasy, joy touches its limit” – community is ecstasy – so lovers must be exposed to community or are its exposure of its own innermost possibility. This is the node in Nancy’s text where he is most magnetically drawn to fascism or to ‘fascist excess’ as the alleged paroxysm of communion (“delirium of incarnated communion”, ibid.) – because in his view only in the fascist orgy can community become the lover of itself and at the same time touch itself as a community of lovers. But what does this touching look like? It is a touching of the limit. Just as one is hoping to discover what the communion-orgy of the fascist masses might be – Nancy shies away from the transgression his text desires and drops back down into an image of a work, not of love: “Lovers touch each other, unlike fellow citizens (unless, once again, in the delirium of a fanaticized mass or in the piling up of exterminated bodies – wherever it is a matter of a work).” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit., 39) In this parenthetical remark prefaced by “once again” the text folds upon itself revealing its abyssal trajectory. The parenthesis contains (and segregates) the ‘groundless ground’ of community which Nancy conceals and reveals incessantly throughout his text – as if it mirrored his own process of thinking and unthinking of a thought: – that the “fanaticized mass” meaning the three-headed hybrid: the fusion - Nazi state-people-movement is what Nancy desires in community and that only in this extreme form can community realise its potential for communion - which is at the very least when ‘citizens’ touch one another. But the only example he can think of is the touching of dead bodies or rather exterminated bodies (analogous to the Christian worship of the unique dead body of Christ) – whose inert existence came about as the ‘work’ of the communion. The communion takes place not through the direct erotic touching of the community of itself or of the deified ruler but ‘sublimated’ through the communal touching of the communion’s erotic work of extermination. This resembles a typical structure of perversion – as in de Sade’s “republic of crime” – the perverse entity constitutes itself erotically through the total appropriation and expropriation of the body – its own and the other’s. Klossowski in his analysis of de Sade’s idea of ‘community’ discovers in his utopia of the limitless body a process quite similar to Nancy’s difficult and elusive concept of “compearing” (com-paraît): “An inherent operation of the phantasy of the perverse is the abolishing (divesting) of property on one’s own body as well as the other’s. The perverse operator inhabits the body of the other as his own and in this way communicates (apportions) his own body to the body of the other.” (Pierre Klossowski, “Sade und Fourier” in: Lektüre zu de Sade, Frankfurt, 1981, p. 224) Except, in opposition to Nancy’s ‘compearing’, which is the sharing and splitting of singularities exposed in community - in de Sade’s perverse cosmos the abolishing of the limit (‘sharing’) between bodies is done on a strictly venal and pecuniary basis.

Nancy seems to retract and nullify his claim to have discovered the joy of lovers in ‘the delirium of the fanaticized mass’, which is Nazism – for community is, according to Nancy, above all else, not a work – it is inoperative or non-sacred transcendence. He only allows himself to begin to speak of love, – the touching of the piled up exterminated bodies in the camps (those who pile up touch the bodies and bodies ‘touch’ one another in the piles of the death work) – but ends with “a matter of work” – thinking perhaps that the classification as work will immunize the thought against its own volupté.

It seems more ‘proper’ to say work in the context of the extermination act than love – although was it not the ‘work of love’ – the sexualized love of Volk and Führer which spawned the Auschwitz planet and its new idea of work embodied in “Arbeit macht frei”? Although Nancy tries to displace work with love in his ideal notion of fascist communion – work inevitably asserts itself. It is the simple resistance of the sheer economical nature of fascism to any contrived transcendence. This despite the fact, that fascism is the spiritual ‘messianic’ other of capitalism – hence so precious for its survival. Bataille grasped the intimate connection between a fascist ‘theory of value’ (its discovery of heretofore unknown sources/agencies of value) and sacrifice, death, excess of endless consumption. They had for him a predominantly economic ring.
If there is transcendence in fascism then only through work – but what kind of work?
The seminal Nazi Gestalt, its generic singleton, fixated in a work by Ernst Jünger, which so impressed Heidegger, was not the Lover rather the Worker. (Der Arbeiter - Herrschaft und Gestalt)

What then exactly is the “inoperative community”? Besides revealing that it is not a work nor dedicated to any kind of production and that although not sacred but a sort of replacement for the sacred, Nancy does little to dispel the mystery of this loose appellation of being. It is in any case a Being. One can be forgiven for not quite understanding – not even Agamben who ploughs the same furrow can say much more than - “The only coherent way to understand inoperativeness is to think of it as a generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted (…) in a transitus de potentia ad actum.” (see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 62) Why then say “inoperative”? – if this does not mean broken or obsolete at the very least it is a kind of idleness – perhaps an expectant one – but not one in which one does anything in particular which might become a ‘subject’, one only undoes – is it a mode of potentiality of the end – a kind of waiting for the end or a community towards the end? Or a readiness as in ready-to-hand, awaiting a work which cannot yet be conceived. Is this work-to-come perhaps Heidegger’s “Ereignis” (final event or appropriation)? That is why the community still bears work in the negative sense in its name – a cancelled work but one, which could be renewed at any moment. Still, it is not just a defunct artefact of abandonment – although one is abandoned to it. Nancy hints at what the unworked work of the inoperative community might be – or rather what sort of work will resist being unworked even in the inoperative community. This appears in a footnote appended to the claim: “Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical and institutional.” (“The Inoperative Community” op. cit., p. 31) It is not though the unworking of “the political”. The footnote contains a clue to the provenance of the “inoperative community” – it is a being with a particular openness for the political: “I do not include the political here. In the form of the State or the Party (if not the State-Party), it indeed seems to be the order of a work. But it is perhaps at the heart of the political that communitarian unworking resists.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit., p. 158) Why does the political suddenly appear in the midst of community, supposedly merely the locus of fraternal sharing, now the order of a work of a State or the Party? What State-Party might he be referring to – certainly not the Communist Party? Nancy with typical Heideggerian Bauernschläue (peasant slyness) seems to have hidden the purpose of his seemingly purposeless communication-community in a footnote - it is the base for a political eventuality– one whose potentiality includes a State-Party. The “inoperative community” is not just an anodyne being-in-common – it is a coming State – an existing one would hardly need to ‘resist’, it already is.

Is communitarian resistance Nancy’s form of anti-capitalism? Or is it rather ‘fascinating fascism’ - which habitually assumes this guise? Fascism cures the state for capitalism, another aspect of its being the hypocritical other of capitalism, its negation and fulfillment. Negation means the immanent negation of capital within itself exported to the fascist plane of the political. Here capital disguises itself in the character mask of political theology – in its time of regeneration (palingenesis) or healing in political ecstasy (outside of itself) it assumes the characteristic messianic face of fascism. Capitalism abandons itself in the ‘political’, which is fascism, as if it were in hiding from itself until the necessary purgative time of negative reproduction is completed. This is the night of Bataille’s ‘la part maudite’ of the general economy - when capitalism must go to the archaic roots of all expenditure for its rejuvenation in blood.

“The Inoperative Community” shares the same thinking expressed in some of Heidegger’s later writing on the future of “total mobilization” after the “interruption of the myth” caused by the defeat of the Nazi State in 1945. Faye in his analysis of Heidegger’s writings – Beiträge zur Philosophie and On Ernst Jünger has deciphered in them a vade mecum of Heidegger’s political ‘instructions’ for posterity: “If we had the least doubt about what is really going on in the Beiträge, a passage from his recently published writings, On Ernst Jünger, would dispel it. In a series of paragraphs grouped under the heading “The Question of Truth” (Die Wahrheitsfrage) and subtitled “Truth and figure” (Wahrheit und Gestalt), we can now read the following. “The attribution of rank is the total representation of total mobilization (for the passive, active, and dictatorial types)(the many, the few, the unique).”
This time, Heidegger shows his hand. The conjuration of the three circles exposed in the Beiträge isn’t a triad of ideas but the concerted and clandestine activation of a power directed toward the historical advent of a dictatorship. (…) Heidegger continues, in the Beiträge, to hold to his interpretation of Jünger’s “total mobilization” which he conflates with the Hitlerian and dictatorial relation between Führung and Gefolgschaft. It is true that what Heidegger describes in the Beiträge forms an invisible and apparently idle community, a silent conjuration. But its purpose is to prepare and wait for the unique time and place at which the “people”, assembled according to and by means of that invisible community, will be able to found their “truth”, whose law they will enforce over the whole Western world, or even the entire earth.” (Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 281)

Heidegger’s “invisible and idle community”, the “silent conjuration” of the faithful would appear to surprisingly illuminate the enigma of the “inoperative community”. At least it serves as a striking precedent for such a thought of community in waiting.
The “political” could be regarded as the ‘code’ in Nancy’s text for the thinking of such a ‘risorgimento’ of a fascist State-Party-People. The inoperative community would be the cadre (Bund or ‘the few’) in whom this return is continuously inscribed in being and the ‘law’ to which the submissive many are abandoned. Presumably ‘the unique’ would eventually arise in it too. In great contradistinction to the founding era of fascism in the twentieth century – the ‘post-modern’ fascism of the “inoperative community” does not seem to have any one particular territory nor ‘metaphysical people’ – it is nomadic, anonymous, headless, deterritorialised like the ‘multitude’ – it is a kind of Luft-fascism. The Luft-fascism of today has only one tangible ‘homeland’ as yet - in its writings – its “Grab in der Luft” (“grave in the air”, Paul Celan, Todesfuge - Death Fugue). “The outline of singularity would be “political” – as would the outline of its communication and its ecstasy. “Political” would mean a community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication, or destined (emphasis sm) to this unworking: (…) To attain such a signification of the “political” does not depend, or in any case not simply, on what is called a “political will”. (…) it implies writing. We must not stop writing, or letting the singular outline of our being-in-common expose itself.” (“The Inoperative Community”, op. cit. pp. 40-41)

Nancy’s coy love of fascism and its annihilation of the subject known as ‘fascist communion’ is a love, which dare not speak its name. One can almost hear Bataille laughing.

The Hunger Tower of Ugolino

2010-08-12T06:02:00.000-07:00

Quite contrary to what one would expect, the philosophy of the hunger tower was not to subject its inmates to the odious tortures of the slow hunger death. The governors of the tower were quite content to see its inhabitant live to a ripe old age and to succumb to the natural cessation of bodily and will processes. All was provided in the tower to this end. Attendants replenished food and drink as necessary and always whilst the inmates were sleeping. In their dreams they saw the heavy iron door of their cell opening and the hand and face of the jailer taking away empty dishes with a shovel and lowering down full ones with ropes. Sometimes a madrigal sung by a castrato voice as sweet as Farinelli’s sounded so real they woke briefly. But only in the dream. Music was banned in the tower. They all seemed to sleep a great deal.

In the beginning of their incarceration the inmates were disbelieving about the efficacy of the hunger tower. They scoffed at the tales of their predecessors who gave the hunger tower its name. Few means of distraction were allowed the inmates, but those who wished could pass their days in an abutting bare room called the library. Furnished much like a monk’s cell, the only works in the library were a collection of decrees and papal bulls and the diaries or journals of some former prisoners who had ended their days by starvation. The present occupant of the tower would resist reading those journals for a while; he could foresee the effect of vicariously living the life he had before him, death by anticipation. He reassured himself that even in confinement “(…) there is not a day, (…) which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal happiness.” (Borges)

After a certain period of time varying with the resistance left in the inmate, his resolve and strength of character, his will to live and when the arid language of the papal bulls had achieved its desiccating effect, he could no longer refrain from glancing at one of those journals left behind by his predecessors. In the beginning he planned only to look at the first page, but the ensuing shudder of recognition usually swept all caution aside – he read on and on about a new sort of species hidden in his feedings. He started gnawing his hands and his fate was sealed.