Friday, May 07, 2010

Journal 07.05.10

G.R.: The inversions of pure culture culminate in the experiences of the German Reformation and the French Revolution, or satisfied Enlightenment and unsatisfied Enlightenment respectively. The Enlightenment in Germany brings about a Reformation without a revolution, while the Enlightenment in France brings about a Revolution, without a Reformation. The abstract spiritualism of the German Enlightenment and the abstract materialism of the French Enlightenment both continue to deny and not to re-form ethical life. They are themselves re-formed by the ethical life which they fail to acknowledge, and recreate and reaffirm the blind faith which they sought to transform. These re-formations are the last and grandest cultures

Hegel in the Phenomenology: …pure being, is not something concretely actual but a pure abstraction.

G.R.: We are left with the realization of the barbarism of our abstract culture, of how we have reproduced that barbarism by denying the ethical, by fixing the illusion that we are absolute or pure consciousness in our moral law or in the law of our hearts. We are indeed admonished, contrite, but not ethical: for the possibility of becoming ethical does not depend on our moral decision nor on our words. It does not depend on our Fichtean will.

Being according to Hegel´s Logic: Being means absence of determination or characteristic. The concept of being is achieved by abstracting from all characteristics, and is therefore empty and formal.

From Kant´s Prolegomena: There is a distinction between a boundary (Grenze) and a limit (Schranke). A boundary presupposes a space to be found outside a determined and determinable space which encloses whatever is inside the boundary. A limit is quantitative and does not imply any specific or determinable space beyond the limit, but implies a mere negative, a quantity of series which is not complete. A limit does not imply something beyond the limit which is qualitatively attainable, which is unavailable to knowledge, but knowable as such. It implies simply an absence of any expectation of completing an infinite series in any inner progression. According to Kant, mathematics, for example, recognizes limits, while it is the task of metaphysics to lead to the boundaries of knowledge and to determine them without being able to determine what is beyond them.

From Hegel´s Logic: “What is thus found only comes to be through being left being” (This is the argument against Fichte´s positing of the absolute) For Hegel there´s no positing or dissolution of the Absolute without reflection

According to Hegel, Fichte´s system is one in which every relation is one of domination and being dominated precisely because life has given itself up to servitude (remember life as a grave or what Arendt wrote about Benjamin: you have to earn your own grave). Reflection dominates it and has gained the victory over reason. According to Hegel “this state of indigence is stated to be natural law”. It remains ever so indeterminate.

G.R. Grand Finale: Hegel´s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought. If we cannot think the absolute this means that it is therefore not our thought in the sense of not realized. The absolute is the comprehensive thinking which transcends the dichotomies between concept and intuition, theoretical and practical reason. It cannot be thought (realized) because these dichotomies and their determination are not transcended.

When Hegel speaks about the end of art, religion and possibly philosophy he doesn´t mean that they cannot continue, but perhaps that it is their telos what can no longer run free. They have to self-constitute themselves, legitimate themselves in autonomy and avoid any ambition to be truly universal consciousness because the universal can only be posited by the abstract and thus, it is limited to begin with as far as the abstraction anticipates something. Anticipates the movement toward which it crawls and stand ultimately after the positing and as an a priori as well.

Question: Why is Hegel so opposed to representation? It is perhaps something that has to do with a solipsistic opposition to symbols and by tour de passage to archetypes? Maybe this in itself holds the secret of why Voegelin called him “magician” and held such distaste for him; in fact more than he held for anyone else, Heidegger included.

Phenomenology = Education for Politics (Isn´t this precisely what Plato meant by “theology”?)

Why Lukács, Adorno and Benjamin weren´t Orthodox Marxists? Because they attained what Marx didn´t which has been so extensively explicated in Derrida and Kofman; they understood Marxism as a culture and instead of severing the dialectical laws inherent to this positing they reflected on Marxism because they understood it as a Method. What might be flawed here is that (at least according to G.R.) they learnt their Marx from scientific sociology and by detour, from Neo-Kantianism, meaning that they could never bridge the gap from Kant to Hegel and stayed behind the banister of philosophical identities instead of speculation and in that sense the Absolute might have escaped them through the main gate – the gate from which the Messiah would enter, to paraphrase Benjamin.

About teachers: My problem is that what I am looking for is not a university but a teacher; but constantly I find those hiding behind the apologies of bureaucracy. I´ve hoped to find the teacher and then at last to begin studying philosophy but the deceitfulness of this enterprise is boundless. It´s not accurate to say that people most likely learn philosophy from books and from life, and maybe this is the actual reason why I´ve diverted so much from my original plans and have taken a step back from philosophical speculation in order to hold onto my own life and not risk it at the price of being wrapped into the Christian nothingness. There´s definitely a Christian instinct in me, even a Gnostic one – I am completely defined by renunciation to life really, and this has to do not only with philosophy but so much more with the concrete facts of my life that I´m as yet quite unable to internalize. It was very disappointing to receive a letter as such from Nigel Tubbs, since he had been a pupil of Gillian Rose and I was expecting if anything at all, that someone like him would do a little more than merely compliment me on the interesting path of life; interesting has become for a me a word tantamount to “in palliative care”. Perhaps it does take from philosophy to be at the very end of life in order to appreciate to some extent the personal qualities that philosophy in itself not only declares but that as an attitude, demands as well. My greatest fear is that there will be yet another year of stagnation in this miserable orphanage called “home”. Should my plan be as radical as I am expecting to be, the churches and the monasteries is by no means a mediocre option but it would be futile to try to avoid the realization that it is a completely escapist choice; and no more than I am willing to grapple with a permanent situation of illness, I am to put up with comatose Christianity but should the need arise, I must be prepared for everything. I don´t know what any other options there might be, since the prospect of facing real life would mean to accept openly that there´s absolutely nothing else to me than this computer, two pairs of shoes, two books and a filth cave. I feel ought to write some letters to Florence, Marc and Hope but I´m still somewhat reluctant to do it because it would be to blend in greatness with pity and my experience has demonstrated that such reckless movements often go unrewarded. Why do we insist so much on reading the books written by dead people? Perhaps because the fact that they are dead grants us license to do away with their misgivings and failures as teachers and instead focus on the only resource available to us: the greatness of their works and the even greater unprecedented failure of their enterprises. The engagement is just too solitary. For the most part I hold this grudge against bourgeois society only because I´ve spent years and years in the intellectual confinement to libraries and spiritual mediocrity only because I´m unable to pay for an education better than this, and I guess that situating the project psychologically, this is ultimately the root of all possible radicalism; this coactive impossibility to become. Yet the years go by and I still refuse to accept this as a fact, I just pretend to see everything as a temporary obstacle, as something that will wane as soon as I get lucky, as soon as I get a “bisl mazl” for myself. The irony is just translated as insurmountable sadness and the effort is univocally a law in itself: The tragic attempt to avoid defeat at any price, even if it is at the price of loss or death. Univocally a law because mourning becomes the law, the price to be paid in order not to do away with the “good life” cleaning it from the burden of the law; I´ve nearly exhausted every possible instance but I´m not even close to becoming tired. By the first day of June I must be out of this cow shed, or absolutely certain that I will be. At this point the destination is irrelevant – church, university, street… What matters is to live up to one´s own law.

Someone wrote this about G.R.: Rose writers explicitly of her opposition both to Athens (the Greek polis) and to Jerusalem (the Judaic model of polity). In the case of Athens, on her reading, the existing law is taken as transcendent, unquestionable. In the case of Jerusalem, all law is opposed in order to follow the direct word of God which is taken as transcendent, unquestionable. Instead of either city, Rose calls on us to critically engage with the world as it is, not to accept it or seek to escape it. This reminds of what I read of hers once: “New York, Jerusalem, Auschwitz… My three cities of death”

From Marx´s Capital: The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than table turning ever was.

From Sarah Kofman: The camera obscura, in the technical sense of the term, seems to me to be contaminated by more ideological, more unconscious connotations, carried simultaneously by the notion of camera/chamber and that of obscurity. In ideology, ideas are put under lock and key in a room, cut off from the real material base which alone can confer upon them light and truth. The dark chamber is a hole an inch in diameter to which one applies a glass which, letting the rays from external objects pass onto the opposite wall, or onto a curtain held there, allows what it outside to be seen inside. Note: If an ideology appeals to the unconscious - is that the reason why philosophy is ought to be so self-aware?

S.K.: Thus, the camera obscura isolates consciousness, separates it from the real; enclosed, the latter constructs a sort of neoreality, analogous to that produced by psychotics. Marx characterizes this world as ghostly, fantastic, phantasmagorical or even fetishistic… The camera obscura is the unconscious of a class, of the dominant class which, in order to maintain its domination indefinitely, has an interest in hiding from itself the historical character of its domination, indeed all that is historical, the process of genesis, the divisions of labor … indeed, difference itself.

S.K. on Rousseau: The camera obscura enables Rousseau to write a book, the Confessions, which is no longer a book but a painting, a portrait. It allows him to cast upon himself the point of view of God himself. “I will be truthful; I will be so without reservations; I will tell all: the good, the evil; in the end, everything. I will comply rigorously with my title, and the most fearful among the devout will never undertake a better examination of their consciences than that for which I prepare myself; never will they lay before their confessors the innermost recesses of their souls more scrupulously than will I lay mine before the public”.

S.K.: Are Leonardo, Rousseau, and Nietzsche not all linked by the same homosexual structure, by the same desire, the same fear of seeing and knowing, by the same look cast upon an unbearable truth? Have not all three been petrified by the mother?

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