philosophical conversations

Nietzsche and Bataille

Gary, you wrote the other day,

My take on this kind of self-examination of our inner experience is that Bataille is working in the tradition of a therapeutic philosophy, which is concerned to help us deal with our demons; ie., to cure us of those desires and thoughts that make us sick.

But I'm a little uncomfortable with this characterisation of Bataille's philosophy—although this might reflect my own prejudices associated with the term "therapeutic philosophy," and I may have missed your meaning... Bataille is certainly concerned with the personal within philosophy—or how thought and corporeal being engage with one another. But this isn't exactly therapeutic: if anything, he hints at the possibility of becoming crazy as a result of this engagement, and even welcomes such a possibility (notwithstanding the dubiousness of such a claim—perhaps for another post).

I do agree that Bataille's willingness to suffer for philosophy reflects his previous Catholicism... and this also makes sense of his comments about the relation between God and the Christian being based upon their mutual laceration of one another. For instance, where he writes:

It looks as if creatures couldn't communicate with their Creator except through a wound that lacerates integrity.

Or,

In this way God (wounded by human guilt) and human beings (wounded by their own guilt with respect to God), find, if painfully, a unity that seems to be their purpose.

This illustrates for Bataille the self -risk and -mutilation that must occur in any act of communication. This is Bataille's joissance, or enjoyment in pain, which he also claims to share with Nietzsche... they are united through the wounds left in them by their break with God (elsewhere Bataille states that when Nietzsche writes of the death of God, he addresses him directly).

With regard to the contrast between Bataille's passivity and Nietzsche's "commanders and legislators revaluing all values in the face of nihilism", I think there is a strain of Nietzsche's philosophy that is active (and also rather bombastic and macho as well), to be sure. But consider also the sections of Thus Spoke Zarathustra such as "The Vision and the Riddle," and "At Noon," as well as all the quiet moments, when he cannot speak and is forced to commune with his soul: these are highly reflective (even 'passive') texts, wherein Nietzsche sits back and observes the effects of his philosophy upon his life and self (albeit in a stylised manner, especially when compared with Sur Nietzsche). Bataille certainly understands himself in this text to be continuing a tradition of philosophising that began with Nietzsche—the bringing together of the personal and the theoretical.

beyond utility

In the Translator's Preface to Bataille's Inner Experience Leslie Anne Boldt writes:

"We are babblers, when we limit our use of language to utilitarian ends, when we make it serviceable to the projects through which we sidestep our anxiety. This abuse of language mirrors the abuse which we make our existence: we have denatured it in removing from it any trace of the sacred, in our blind observance of the dictums of project and work."

If God is a dead object, what then? We become isolated subjects seeking autonomy.

What happens to the transcendent? Eroticism?

Bataille: On Nietzsche#21

In chapter 11, part 2 of On Nietzsche Bataille acknowledges the inaccessibility of the summit as the excess of tragic intensity, but not the inevitability of decline (moments of exhaustion and fatique). He says:

"Essentially, the summit is where life is pushed to an impossible limit. I reach it, in the feint way that I do, only by recklessly expending my strength....But I cannot give up the summit. I protest....against everything that asks of us that we stifle desire. Though I can only contentedly resign myself to the fate compelling me to work: I'd never dream of doing away with moral rules, since they spring from inevitable decline. We are always declining, and ruinous desire returns again only as strength is restored."

Desire leads to the excess of tragic intensity and then there is the inevitability of decline into exhaustion and fatique.

It is sexual imagery of the sexual orgasm transposed into everyday life. Only Bataille lives in solitude so he does not have the communion of two bodies joined after sex. Instead of sex we have deep torment.

But it makes sense. If we lose the vigor and intensity of our youth, or from overwork, we become drained, exhausted, burned out, longing for the vigor of old.

My take on this kind of self-examination of our inner experience is that Bataille is working in the tradition of a therapeutic philosophy, which is concerned to help us deal with our demons; ie., to cure us of those desires and thoughts that make us sick.

Bataille's mode of self-governance is an acceptance the necesssity of summit and decline. He gives in to it, even as he denies it. He submits. It is the submission to necessity that humanizes him. Does ithis kind of control give him a form of self-suffciency, as with the classical Stoics?

This passivity is a long way from Nietzsche's commanders and legislators revaluing all values in the face of nihilism.

What we seem to be dealing with are serpents in the soul. I am reminded of Seneca, who says that there is no erotic passion that stops short of its own excess. Bataille's summit is all heat and fire. It is the madness of passion that threatens to make us go crazy.

returning to Bataille#20

Joe,
I found your remark on Bataille's reading of Nietzsche very suggestive.

I had not read the earlier Inner Experience, did not know about the triology of La Somme Aaeologiquie and just jumped into reading On Nietzsche blind. Why? Trevor had mentioned Bataille, I saw On Nietzsche in a bookshop and bought it. I started reading whilst trucking back and forth to Canberra, thinking it was going to about Nietzsche and the revaluation of our values.

Was I in for a suprise. I got the rebellion against and the opposition to, the morality and utility, but little else apart from recoiling from the calculated violence of human sacrifice.

In your post yesterday you say:

"What we find is not so much Bataille 'on' Nietzsche, but perhaps 'after' or 'through' Nietzsche. At least, it is not incidental to the text that we witness Bataille's own transformation within it: rather, this transformation is its object."

I must admit that insight, Bataille's own transformation is the object of the reading, had not occured to me. I had stopped reading On Nietzsche because I was getting nowhere with it. I was working on reading Bataille 'on' Nietzsche. My reading had reached a dead end and I just chucked it. It was literature not philosophy and I had no background in French literature, and little by way of a working acquaintance with French philosophy.

If I relate Bataille to my personal crisis, then I can make some headway. Thus in Chapter 10, part 2, Bataille writes:

"Having said goodbye to worries about the future with a blasphemous oath --I lose all reason for existing, in fact, all reason period. I lose the possibility of speaking. Especially speaking as I am now of summit morality is something ridiculous." (p.37)

That's me. I have lost my speaking in my personal life. I have become silent. I only speak in work and in public. I am emotionally closed down and silent in my perosnal life. I sense death and being lost.

Unlike Bataille I have not said goodbye to my worries about the future as I am deeply concerned about getting another job in the next six months, and moving away from the constrictive mode of life of Adelaide.

However, I sense the wound of insufficiency, the anxiety at the heart of being in-the-world, and the frustration with the limits of our existence. And I understand the moral summit of sacrifice. I understand the ritual of violence, as I am employing it to break free of the fears associated with a provincal mode of life. I currently live the intense experience that tears beings apart and I am unable to adequately express that intense experience.

Okay, I can emotionally connect with that.

It is here that I have my doubts.

I can emotionally connect with that, both from my experiences in my personal life and from living the political life---imagine the ecstasy of the Liberal/National Party and the utter desolation of the ALP in Canberra next week.

Bataille, it seems, is all about putting himself through the emotional wringer big time. This kind of struggling with one's demons is a very Catholic way of being-in-the-world. It is not one that I have much time for myself since it is all about suffering and being truely miserable.

It is all about anguish, guilt and torment as the pathway to moral experience. It is all so dam Christian, so individualistic, as it makes the anguish and pain one's own.

And so passive in the face of the meaninglessness of European nihilism. And so accepting of anguish.

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Klossowski, the Body and Language

Personalising the Klossowski material is a good way into it... especially given that he is addressing the manner in which Nietzsche was able to communicate his own experience (emotional and valitudinary) in writing. The unconscious/ conscious distinction is one way of approaching Klossowski's schema. Or, alternatively, it can be divided into the body and language—which more or less align to unconscious/conscious for both Klossowski and Nietzsche anyway. The code of everyday signs [le code des signes quotidiens] is language, and so average, exchangable between every member of one's cultural group. It thus compromises the individuality of the body's experience, favouring (or empowering) the average instincts: that is, those concerned with the survival of the group. From the perspective of consciousness, or the code of everyday signs, it is difficult to experience the body's uniqueness—or whatever sets it apart from the group... And it is especially difficult to express extreme or intense bodily/emotional states (hohe -Gefüle or -Stimmungen). Thus, Klossowski is interested in how Nietzsche was able to find a sign (the eternal return) that could depict his own experience, albeit (or perhaps necessarily) in a veiled manner. The eternal return is, according to Klossowski, Nietzsche's 'phantasm': an obsessional image that conveys his most dominant impulse, and a touch-stone to which his writing returns, again and again.

Pierre Klossowski
Roberte and Gulliver (ca. 1978)

We could see Klossowski's own phantasm as expressed in his artwork , which often depicts a woman, Roberte, exhibiting herself. This phantasm is elaborated in writing in his novel Roberte Ce Soir, although I have to admit that I find this less interesting than his work on Nietzsche and Sade.

'Klossowski, Nietzsche, eternal return#3'...

It is a very hot day in Adelaide and I'm struggling with reading Klossowski chapter on Nietzsche and eternal return in his book Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.

I've though about this material off and on. I've decided the best way to approach this is to personalize it, as it is all about the unconscious processes of subjectivity. From what I can gather Klossowski appears to be about the chaotic, fluctuating impulses rising and falling inside me, and about the way these impulses then turn back on themselves, repeat themselves, and imitiate themselves.

Klossowski writes:

"Intensity is subject to a moving chaos without beginning or end." (p.62)

Okay, I can understand this. Whilst flying to Melbourne my subjectivity was full of emotional intensities arising from my experience of living in a destructive personal relationship, which I am seeking to find my out off. These intense feelings --eg., the pain of being emotionally hurt--are repetitious, dividing; and they join up with previous traces of similar emotional states. I have been here many times before.

But my effort is to understand these experiences, to make sense of them, so that I can extract myself from the destructive emotional cycle. That rise and fall that of intense painful impluses has a momentum of its own; one I find so debilitating and exhausting. I can accept the imagery of waves of intense emotion rolling through my subjectivity (or psyche) and a remembering of these emotional states and then a forgetting of them.

Klossowski contrasts this unconscious inside the psyche with an outside--to the sign of self in trhe code of everyday communication--eg., Gary in the everyday work context doing the soft shoe political shuffle with others in Canberra and Melbourne. Kkossowski writes:

"Up to now, in the everyday context, thought was always referred back to the designation 'myself'. But what becomes of my coherence at the degree of intensity where thought ceases to refer back to me in the designation 'myself', and instead invents a sign by which it would designate its own coherence with itself."

Well, I've been there. It is a familar psychological space.

The sign is 'wounded, suffering', disconnected from the everyday context , and adrift on a stormy sea of turbulent intense emotion.

Klossowski say it is here that the image of Circle is formed. My thought enter in such strict coherence with this sign of the circle that it takes on the power of all thought. Klossowski says:

"There is nothing here to distinquish the designating intensity from the designated intensity, to re-establish the coherence between the self and world, as constituted by everyday designations. A single circuit brings me back to the code of everyday signs, and then makes me depart, again leaving me at the mercy of the sign, as soon as I try to explain to myself the event it represents." (p. 64)

Here is a sign in which I am nothing and a sign to which I always return to nothing.

Well, the only I can understand this is the intense ache of emotional pain that rises up from the unconscious after a fight, and which then overwhelms me.

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Heidegger: world as picture

Since I 've been doing the political soft shoe shuffle in Melbourne all day and I have no energy to post. So I have reworked and reposted this entry from yesterday about Heidegger's paper called The age of the world picture.'

This paper is about the modernity's metaphysics of the becoming of human beings as subjects, human beings as the foundation of knowledge and the reduction of the world to a fixed image. This metaphysics was inaugrated by Descartes. Nietzsche is read as a variation of this metaphysics of modernity in which the world becomes a picture; the world is “conceived and grasped as picture”, where “whatever is comes into being in and through representedness”.

Two quotes:

"A world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world, but the world conceived and grasped as picture."

"The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture."

This passage may help us to make sense of these quotes. Heidegger says:

"The fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the new age. The world appears as re-presentation 'for man'. In the classical age, to the contrary man is the one who is looked upon by that which is. Put simply: the gods or God used to look upon us and we had a perception that they he watched us; now we look at the world and we understand the world as that which we can see. "

In this picture philosophy come to provide the concepts underpinning an ongoing programme of scientific research, and is then dissolved into the individual empirical sciences.

On Heidegger's very forceful reading of Nietzsche's texts Nietzsche reduces what there is to a projection of what it is to be human. Hence Nietzsche is the culmination of the metaphysics of modernity.

A question:

'Does the modern end when the world is no longer presented to viewers as a picture, to be subject to conscious utilitarian calculations and pre-determined actions with foreseeable ends?'

Heidegger's narrative is about radical transformation in our understanding of being that took place in the 17th century. The change was implicit in Descartes’ introduction of representation. Kant then made Descartes’ unthought explicit in the centrality of his notion of Vorsetellung. Heidegger's interpretation emphasizes the fact that human beings objectify everything:

"To represent means to bring what is present at hand before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm ... What is decisive is that man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself and that he makes it secure as the footing for a possible development of humanity."

On this account human beings explain and evaluate whatever is, in its entirety from the standpoint of human beings and in relation to human beings. Everything else is elided.

Another and more familiar way of putting this is to say that this constitutes the humanistic understanding of being.

Bataille, Nietzsche

It's been a while since my last post, mostly because I've been writing a paper on Bataille's reading of Nietzsche (Sur Nietzsche), and its relation to Kleinian psychoanalytic theory. Of course, this is a relation that I'm positing, for what it's worth, and doesn't inform us about a lineage of thought so much as (an element that I think is missing from Heidegger's approach to interpreting Nietzsche) the experience of reading, as a bodily experience. What I find interesting about Bataille's commentary is how it allows us to think about what it is that motivates us to read philosophy: what kind of experience one looks for in reading. He avows to have a personal connection to Nietzsche 'the man' through his texts, and claims that the only way to understand Nietzsche is to live as Nietzsche... which seems extreme, doesn't it?

Still, one needs to be able to identify in some way with the text, and the textual entity that is its author. Especially with a figure like Nietzsche, whose texts tend either to seduce or repel us, the question of affect, between reader and text, would seem to be formative for the kind of interpretation that reader can produce. Bataille claims at the beginning of Sur Nietzsche to be motivated by the fear of going crazy, just as Nietzsche had done; and he says elsewhere that Nietzsche addresses him directly when he announces the death of God—thus indicating his own experience of dissillusionment with the Church. For the most part, as I think Trevor has said earlier, the book reads like a log (or blog) of his experience of reading through Nietzsche's texts, and the effect that these texts exert upon him personally. What we find is not so much Bataille 'on' Nietzsche, but perhaps 'after' or 'through' Nietzsche. At least, it is not incidental to the text that we witness Bataille's own transformation within it: rather, this transformation is its object.

This marks a real difference between Bataille's reading and that which we find in Heidegger's volumes: for, in the latter case, it is Heidegger who places Nietzsche in the context of his own philosophy, and not the other way around. Bataille writes in Nietzsche and the Fascists that Nietzsche must always lead, and can never follow... meaning that any attempt to use Nietzsche's philosophy as a tool for one's own purposes cannot remain true to Nietzsche. In Heidegger's case, it is arguable that Nietzsche follows...

With regard to Klossowski's interpretation of Nietzsche, I would say that it bears a closer relation to Bataille's reading than Heidegger's. Klossowski is also interested in the reader's relation to the text, and the kind of experience that reading philosophy involves... Also, what kind of material can be transmitted to the reader through text. Both Bataille and Klossowski are concerned with the text as a medium for corporeal movements, and the question of contagion of bodily forces (will to power?) from author to reader. Bataille's emphasis upon communication reflects this:

"Your life is not limited to that incomprehensible inner stream; it also streams out from itself, incessantly opening to whatever flows out or rushes up to it. The ongoing whirling that composes you collides with similar whirlings, which form a vast figure driven by rhythmic restlessness. Now, for you to live signifies not just the flows and momentary dispositions of light that unite in you but the movements of heat or light moving from one person to another, or from you to another person, or from another to you (even as you now read me, the contagion of my fever reaches you): words, books, monuments, symbols, laughter—all these represent just so many paths to that contagiousness, to those impulses..." (Bataille 1992, 25 - 6, Cited from Inner Experience)

According to Bataille, writing mediates a bodily encounter, or confrontation, between the author and reader: impulses, moods, dispositions, are transmitted from one to the other through text.

I think this is the question that Klossowski also takes up in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle—albeit in a very different style to Bataille. Namely, how is the singular communicated by means of the completely general, average medium of language? This is also the question he poses in Sade My Neighbour, and so those books are best read alongside one another.

I was going to talk about Klein as well, but perhaps I'll leave it until another post.

Heidegger on modernity

A Heidegger quote from his Nietzsche vol. 3 part two to counterbalance Klossowsk's individual experience interpretation of Nietzsche:

"The essence of modernity is fulfilled in the age of consumate meaninglessness. No matter how our histories may tabulate the concept and course of modernity, no matter which phenomena in the fields of politics, poetry, the natural sciences, and the social order they may appeal to in order to explain modernity, no historical mediation can afford to bypass two mutually related essential determinations within the history of modernity: first, that man installs and secures himself as subiectum, as the nodal point for beings as a whole; and secondly, that the beingness of beings as a whole is grasped as the representedness of whatever can be produced and explained." (p.178)

Nietzsche is slotted into that understanding of modernity: of human beings becoming a subject that gathers everything to itself---a self assertive subject--- and the world as picture. Human beings are the measure of everything that is. The world is what they picture.

Modern philosophy--from Descartes onwards---is a reworking of this structure of human beings as the ground of knowledge.

nihilism & consumer capitalism

The following quote is a good statement of the consequences of nihilism, understood as the devaluation of our highest values. It was posted by Ali Muhammad Rizvi over at the excellent Stray Reflections.

The quote is from Terry Eagleton's After Theory. Eagleton says:

". . . the non-normative has become the norm. Nowadays, it is not just anarchists for whom anything goes, but starlets, newspaper editors, stockbrokers and corporation executives. The norm now is money; but since money has absolutely no principles or identity of its own, it is no kind of norm at all. It is utterly promiscuous, and will happily tag along with the highest bidder. It is infinitely adaptive to the most bizarre or extremist situations, and like the Queen has no opinions of its own about anything." pp. 16-17

A review of the book says that Eagleton traces the rise of cultural theory through its golden age (c. 1965-80), and bemoans its decline into a shallow, depoliticized preoccupation with sex and pop-culture ephemera. As grad students churn out "reverential essays on Friends," latter-day cultural theorists espouse a "dim-witted" postmodernism that dismisses as hegemonic claptrap all talk of common values, objective truth and coherent historical narratives.

Eagleton contends that the cultural studies postmodernists have turned away from the great socialist project of collective action in support of universal human liberation; and they have aligned themselves with the nihilistic thrust of a consumer capitalism they pretend to oppose.

This is fairly familar stuff by Eagleton and it borders on the cartoon thinking of Enlightenment blackmail that wilfully ignores the cultural norms of market capitalism.

However, the Eagleton quote does expresses the emptiness of a nihilistic culture of a market capitalist society. The cultural response to this nihilism?

Many have returned to, or stayed with, Christianity, or some other form of religion (eg., Islam), as this offers them some ethical bearing in a nihilistic world.

Liberals, by and large, remain content with individual rights or being utilitarian desiring machines. They are happy with a negative freedom (plus individual autonomy) so as to achieve their desires or self-interest. In practice it often means accumulation as it is understood by the capitalist market. Hence the cliche that happiness=accummulation of material possessions.

Bu these is a reaction to this (often called the rat race) in the form of a seachange, where many seek a better quality of life to the conventional stressed-filled work life, broken relationships and lots of money as compensation. That quality of life is understood in diverse ways, often without appealing to the grand narrative and objective truth of the Enlightenment that Eagleton says is the only option.

Honestly, what is happening in academia in various post modern cultural studies departments is not the same as what is happening in the lifeworld. By the lifeworld we understand the shared common understandings, including values, that develop through face to face contacts over time in various social groups, from families to communities. The lifeworld carries all sorts of assumptions about who we are as people and what we value about ourselves: what we believe, what shocks and offends us, what we aspire to, what we desire, what we are willing to sacrifice to which ends, and so forth.

There is a lot of diversity in the lifeword, as the rejection of the growth fetish by the seachange phenomenon in Australia attests.

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death of God

It's a different account to the one offered by Nietzsche:

Leunig

But we end up in the same place. God is dead. Human beings killed him off.

What then?

For Nietzsche that means we shiver at confronting the chaos of existence without any comforts, clothes or props. It is living in nothingness. It is too raw for us. Christianity did the comfort job of providing moral clothes for us for almost two centuries, but now it no longer does so.

So where do we go? What do we do now? Most of us cannot live in nothingness and without meaning. We need some sort of moral code to guide us in living our life. We still need to make judgements about what is right and wrong and good and evil in our everyday lives.

Human, All Too Human

My life is in crisis: personal, political and philosophical. So I've started re- reading Nietzsche's early book of aphorisms, 'Human, All Too Human', as this text was written in crisis: personal, artistic and philosophical.

In aphorism 35 (Bk. 2, 'On the History of Moral Feelings') Nietzsche says:

"That meditating on things human, all too human ..... is one of the means by which man can ease life's burden; that by exercising this art, one can secure presence of mind in difficult situations and entertainment amid boring surroundings; indeed, that from the thorniest and unhappiest phases of one's own life one can pluck maxims and feel a bit better thereby: this was believed, known--in earlier centuries. Why has it been forgotten in this century....?

Nietzsche reconnects with the old Roman tradition of philosophy as a way of life through La Rochefoucauld's aphoristic style of writing found in his Maximes and Reflections.

Two examples of Rochefoucauld's maximes:
"What we term virtue is often but a mass of various actions and divers interests, which fortune, or our own industry, manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste." Maxime 1

And maxime no.12:

"Whatever care we take to conceal our passions under the appearances of piety and honour, they are always to be seen through these veils."

Our passions pop or peep though the virtues of our everyday morality by which we conduct ourselves.

This is a different Nietzsche to the conventional one of Nietzsche as the destroyer of Christianity. It is Nietzsche wearing the hat of the moralist of everyday life.

It is the tradition that the Adorno of Minima Moralia works within.

Heidegger & Nietzsche's eternal return

I've returned to a cool Adelaide from the hot north winds of Canberra.

Whilst away within the contours and pain of political crisis I thought that I would keep Heidegger's Nietzsche on the desk next to me. It would help me in my struggle with reading Klossowski's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return in his difficult Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.

In Bk 3 part Two of 'Nietzsche' Heidegger says:

"Reckoned chronologically, Nietzsche pursued the thought of the eternal return of the same before he conceived of the will to power, eventhough intimatioons f the latter may be found every bit as early...Nietzsche himself was never able to explicitly think through its [eternal return of the same] with will to power as such, nor elevate it into a metaphysical conception. The reason for this is not that the thought remained in any way obscure ot him, but that like all metaphysicans prior to him, Nietzsche was unable to find his way back to the fundamental traits of the guiding metaphysical projection. For the general traits of the metaphysical projection of beings upon beingness, and thereby the representation of beings as such in the domain of presence and permanence, can be known only when we come to experience that projection as historically cast." (p. 164)

'Recurrence' understood as a principle in a metaphysics of becoming is the permanentizing of what becomes: it is the point where becoming of what becomes (eg., an entity) is secured in the duration of its becoming.

The 'eternal' is the point where the permanentizing of such constancy in the direction of its circling back into itself and forward toward itself. What becomes is the same itself.

That's the metaphysics.

Klossowski, Nietzsche, eternal return#2

Finally I have a spare moment within the Canberra soft shoe shuffle. The political machinery and theatre has wound down, and I have some space from the all too human political dialectic of triumphalism and despair to reconnect to circle back to where I was a week or so ago. I return to my philosophical self that I had stepped out off when I went to Canberra.

In this return to the old I can return to reading Klossowski's chapter on Nietzsche's eternal return in his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. If you remember I said that I was going to read this chapter with help from Joanne Faulkner's paper 'Reading Nietzsche's' Sick" Body: Klossowski's Interpretation of Nietzsche.'

Joanne says that Klossowski is interested in the body, its fabrication by language, and the way that Nietzsche put his own life in danger for his experiments in writing. On this reading Klossowski interprets Nietzsche's importance as a philosopher of the body, and highlights the significance of Nietzsche's sick body to the development of the doctrine of eternal recurrence Relive your life innumerable times and will to relive it innumerable times).

In Chapter 3 ('The Experience of Eternal Return') Klossowski's focus is on the lived experience of the loss of a given identity, not on the metaphysics as per Heidegger. So the revelation of eternal return brings about the successive realization of all possible identities.

Klossowski says:

"I deactualize my present self in order to will myself in all the other selves whose entire series must be passed through so that, in accordance with the circular movement, I once again become what I am at the moment I discover the law of the Eternal Return." (p.58).

The moment eternal return is revealed I cease to be myself and become susceptible to becoming other selves. I foget this revelation once I am outside the memory of myself. So we have a circular movement in which I free myself from myself--from my previous identity.
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Australian Enlightenment

I'm still on the road. I've been puzzling about the Enlightenment in Australia in the light of my re-reading de Sade through Klossowski's text.

As I understand it, from 1788-1850, when European Australia was formed, the tradition or discourse in the colonial culture that shaped and gave direction to the conduct of everyday life, drew heavily on the 'world view' of the European Enlightenment.

This discourse was understood along the lines of society's problems being solved by the exercise of reason, and that if such a path took place, then improvement and progress would follow.

This still largely determines the way politics is conducted. For the left social betterment comes through the state serving its citizens through careful planning and the cultivation of improving institutions (schools, gaols and hospitals). For the right progress comes throughh the economic growth as laid down by Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment.

Both anabranches drew heavily of the Bethamite utilitarian strain of the Enlightenment, which used the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number to achieve social reform based on order an uniformity.

So de Sade can be read as rupturing this upbeat utilitarian discourse from within, thereby providing another voice to the romantic and Christian voices of dissent.

Klossowski, Sade my Neighbour

I'm on the road doing a soft shoeshoe shuffle in Canberra. I will post latter. I will try and read Pierre Klossowski's Sade My Neighbour when I can grab a quiet moment.

From what I can gather this text was the origin of the re-reading of de Sade in France undertaken by Bataille, Sartre and de Beauvoir, and Deleuze. Hence its historical importance of Klossowski's text.

And, I presume, Klossowski's Sade My Neighbour is the key text to the reading of de Sade in Australia, which has just started to happen from I can gather.

The quick skim at the airport indicated that de Sade is far more than the debauched aristocratic libertine. That is the conventional image in Australia. He celebrates sexual perversions and so sits behind all the S&M bondage stuff that circulates on the internet under the sign of pornography.

Klossowki's text also gives us the philosopher of nature, who worked in the atheistic materialist tradition of the French Encyclopediasts, such as La Mattrie, Helvetius and d'Holbach. Their metaphysics of nature is one of matter in motion, which sees nature and human beings as machines, and which allows for the unlimited rational exploitation of nature by human beings.

What a suprise.

de Sade, nature, transgression

Joanne,
You write in this post that de Sade:

"...aims not only to exceed, but to offend 'procreative' sexuality through the act of sodomy, by prodigally planting his 'seed' in shit. Against this, however, we also find in Sade a curious deference to the Law of Nature, to which the characters in his books frequently avow their service, by taking part in the destruction that is a necessary counterpart to flourishing."

Over at Jahsonic it is stated that:

"The cruelty Sade is known for is the natural outgrowth of his philosophy and the pervailing attitude toward Nature during his life. Nature is the only real ruler of man, he says. Nature is sometimes cruel, indeed in the view of Western Civilization, Nature is always cruel. Therefore, says the Marquis, humans, if they are to be in harmony with the only true governing force, must allow themselves to at least imagine being cruel. Now, while one might criticize the Marquis for not being able to cross the rubicon with his views on Nature as he did with homosexuality, the fact remains that the conclusion is logical within De Sade's framework."

Is that what you had in mind? The law of nature is cruel?

de Sade: Juliette

Another image taken from online archive of the 1789 Dutch edition of "The story of Juliette" and the 1797 edition of "The story of Justine" by the Marquis de Sade:

The image does look as if these texts describe a harmless aristocratic sexual romp. However, de Sade and his publisher were both arrested by the Minister of Police in 1801 for writing and publishing Justine and Juliette.

De Sade was not allowed a trial, and he was put put directly in prison. His detractors had him declared insane, and he was transferred to Charenton Asylum, where continued efforts were made to silence his pencils and subsequent influences on the outside world. Pre-revolutionary France took exception to the Marquis de Sade's tale sof strange desires, perverse pleasures, and the ultimate corruption of innocence.

The narrative background to the above literary texts is that Justine and Juliette are orphans who forced to leave the orphanage where they have been brought up. Juliette quickly takes refuge in a brothel and embarks on a prosperous career of vice and murder. Justine attempts to follow a more virtuous path but becomes a victim of the perverse and decadent world of pre-revolutionary France.

According to this a account Justine is the story of a chaste, virtuous woman who is shown in the most graphic and vile ways that such virtue is rewarded only with suffering in the world outside convent walls. The virtuous Justine, who keeps to the moral rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation

Juliette is the story of the virtuous Justine's sister, who embraces the libertine philosophy that her sister shys away from. Upon leaving the convent, Juliette makes the acquaintances of a few people who proceed to show her the ways of the wicked world, peppered with lengthy discussions in opposition of virtue, chastity, and all things religious.

On this account over at Lust Magazine de Sade's philosophy is about unleashing the beast that lies within all human beings, as is his belief that goodness and virtue can only lead to ill consequences and is punished with vice.

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer give a more complex account. They say, with Immanual Kant in mind, that:

" The moral teachings of the Enlightenment bear witness to a hopeless attempt to replace enfeebled religon with some reason for persistng in society when interest is absent." (p.85)

Further on in the text Adorno and Horkheimer discuss the way the way Juliette operates. Their picture of Juliette is that she is a child of the Enlightenment. They say that:

"...the work of the Marquis de Sade, like that of Nietzsche, constitutes the intransigent critique of practical reason, in contradistinction to which Kant's critique itself seems a revocation of his own thought. It makes the scientistic the destructive principle. Justine, the virtuous sister, is a martyr for the moral law. Juliette draws the conclusion that the bourgeosie wanted to ignore: she demonizes Catholicism as the most-up-to-date mythology, and with it civilization as a whole...In all of this Juliette is by no means fanatical....her procedures is enlightened and efficient as she goes about her work of sacrilege....Julitte embodies...the pleasures of attacking civilization with its own weapons. She favours system and consequence.She is a proficient manipulator of the organ of rational thought." (p.94)

As they point out Juliette believes in science and despises any form of worship whose rationality cannot be demonstrated. She is a child of the aggressive Enlightenment.

How does that account fit in with your account?

Sade, Klossowski, and Psychoanalysis

Your post provided a lot of food for thought yesterday, Gary. You are right that Sade gestures toward a mode of eroticism similar to that of Bataille, in that he aims at a bodily experience that transgresses socially 'endorsed' sexuality... In fact, he aims not only to exceed, but to offend 'procreative' sexuality through the act of sodomy, by prodigally planting his 'seed' in shit. Against this, however, we also find in Sade a curious deference to the Law of Nature, to which the characters in his books frequently avow their service, by taking part in the destruction that is a necessary counterpart to flourishing.

What I find interesting about Sade is this interplay between transgression and his allegiance to the law. This tension is reflected also in his use of writing—a most general medium—as an attempt to express his irreducible difference; the desire that he will not give up for the sake of fitting in. Klossowski takes this up in his book Sade My Neighbour,

"The peculiarly human act of writing presupposes a generality that a singular case claims to join, and by belonging to this generality claims to come to understand itself. Sade as a singular case conceives his act of writing as verifying such belongingness. The medium of generality in Sade’s time is the logically structured language of the classical tradition; in its structure this language reproduces and reconstitutes in the field of communicative gestures the normative structure of the human race in individuals. This normative structure is expressed physiologically by a subordination of the life functions, a subordination that ensures the preservation and propagation of the race. To this need to reproduce and perpetuate oneself which is in force in each individual there corresponds the need to reproduce and perpetuate oneself by language. Whence the reciprocity of persuasion, which makes possible the exchange of individual singularities in the circuit of generality. This reciprocity is brought about only in conformity with the principle of identity or of noncontradiction, which makes logically structured language one with the general principle of understanding, that is universal reason. (SMN, 14)"

Through language one’s body serves the species, trading with other bodies to reinforce the normative structure that best serves generality: thus the species is perpetuated. But were we to draw attention to the under-belly of language or reason—to those ‘monstrous’ elements that present reason with an image of itself that it refuses to recognise—then propagation of a different kind would take place, and would threaten to replace ‘healthy’ language and morality. According to Klossowski, Sade’s project involves acquainting reason with its inhuman face, and thus giving rise to the destruction and reorganisation, rather than reproduction, of the species. Klossowski elaborates Sade's effort to disclose in writing the excess that cannot be recognised by the community, by inventing a society of criminals... That is, the reader becomes a co-conspiritor with Sade, against reason and the moral community. This is also rather like the complôt that he identifies in Nietzsche's writing...

I think I've probably said enough for now, given that it's my first post, and I'm a bit technophobe. Gary, with regard to Beauvoir 'making Sade safe' by aligning him with psychoanalysis, there is also a tendency to make psychoanalysis safer than it has the potential to be. I would think that the excess to which you refer is precisely what psychoanalysis allows us to imagine (the beyond of the pleasure principle and sublimation, both of which are taken up by Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular). But you're right, there is always a tendency to domesticate figures like Sade, and to render neutral what makes them most interesting.

Marquis de Sade

The engraving below is taken from the 1789 Dutch edition of "The story of Juliette" and the 1797 edition of "The story of Justine".

A biography of the Marquis de Sade.

During his 13 years of imprisonment he penned a number of pornographic texts that he published in the period after his release. This works include The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine (or the Misfortunes of Virtue), and Philosophy in the Boudoir. The is use value of these have been treated as akin to the value of excrement.

There is a post on de Sade over at Junk for Code. This argues that the body, seen as a constellation of pleasures and pains determined by desires, instincts, and appetites, is central to aesthetic discourse. On this account:

"....the aesthetic is a rebellion against the rational scientific enlightenment, the valorization of systematic theory, and the focus on the mind. This rebellion is marked by de Sade and then continued by Bataille, Genet, Klossowski, and Artaud. Here language sings the glory and pain of the polymorphously perverse."

Eroticism is the individual technic of sovereign values which Bataille opposes to utility. Eroticism destroys thedualism between subject and object and its politics, are contrary to the interests of the state the subject of excessive desire breaks away from all restraints" and annihilates form.

De Sade has appeared before in this weblog in the form of drawings by Hans Bellmer and in relation to Bataille. Bataille's text, The Use Value of de Sade from Visions of Excess is in the library but the links are no longer working.

In a 1951 essay, "Must We Burn Sade," Simone de Beauvoir identifies Sade as a forerunner of Freud with an intuitive grasp of the human subjectivity with an understanding of sexual perversion:

"It is remarkable, for example, that in 1795 Sade wrote: ‘Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.’ Not only does Sade, in the first part of this text, anticipate what has been called the ‘pansexuality’ of Freud, but also he makes eroticism the mainspring of human behavior. In addition, he asserts…that sexuality is charged with a significance that goes beyond it. Libido is everywhere, and it is always far more than itself. Sade certainly anticipated this great truth. He knew that the ‘perversions’ that are vulgarly regarded as moral monstrosities or physiological defects actually envelop what would now be called an intentionality. He understood, too, that our tastes are motivated not by the intrinsic qualities of the object but by the latter’s relationship with the subject. In a passage in La Nouvelle Justine he tries to explain coprophilia. His reply is faltering, but clumsily using the notion of imagination, he points out that the truth of a thing lies not in what it is but in the meaning it has taken on for us in the course of our individual experience. Intuitions such as these allow us to hail Sade as a precursor of psychoanalysis."

De Sade is more than a precursor of psychoanalysis. That makes him safe, like the merely literary defense of de Sade. De Sade represents the excesive difference that must be expelled from the same in order for the same to be the same. In bodily terms: excretions of all kinds; in the body-politic: sacrifice and the sacred.

Update
That's a Bataillian reading. What the heck. Bataille and Klossowski understood that de Sade poses a challenge to the progressive, emancipatory Enlightenment understanding of technology and development that we still live inside in Australia. de Sade provides us with an entry into grasping the nightmare of the Enlightenment's destruction in the 20th century: to begin to grasp and understand the way rationalism embraces and becomes evil, whilst remaining good.

nihilism in the academy

A good account of ethical nihilism (in Nietzsche's sense of the devaluation of our highest values) in the academy (eg.,the postmodern English Department) can be found in some posts on Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass back in 2002.

There is an extended discussion over several posts on the role of politicized postmodernism in corrupting the field of professional literary study, on the English department as a model postmodern community, and the politicized postmodernism of the English department.

The relevant links are:

Some choice outtakes from Jonah [Goldberg]
In my July 10 blog
This is Part Two of
This is Part Three of
This is Part Four of
This is the final installment

It is well worth reading, as it exmplifies the argument made by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue about the failure of Enlightenment's ethical project to create a rational ethics that would accepted by any rational being no matter where or when they lived.

What Erin O'Conner describes is the living in the aftermath of that collapse.

Klossowski, Nietzsche, eternal return

Chapter 3 of Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is called the 'Experience of Eternal Return.' It similarly starts with one of Nietzsche's letters (14th August, 1881). This letter to Peter Gast is about the explosiveness of his feelings and his disconnection from his friends. Nietzsche homeless.

Klossowski quickly moves to forgetting and anamnesis in relation to the eternal return of the same. Now this is tricky territory, since forgetting is a much used weapon in the conservative's political/polemical arsenal. The narrative goes like this. The 20th century is rightly called the "ravaged century", and it has been ravaged by the intellectual." Inebriation with abstract reasoning, with disembodied Platonic ideals, induces intellectuals to forget the real historical conditions under which lofty ideals approach actualization. They are forever comparing history and reality to their lofty ideals, and cursing history and reality for failing to live up their ideals. Discouraged, they then turn with slothful incredulity to projects of utopian design; they subtilize themselves into savages, as Burke put it. The liberal education system foolishly aims at turning everyone into modern intellectuals. Intellectuals have a forgetfulness about historical context.

Klossowski takes a different approach to forgetting. He understands Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return as an abrupt awakening in an ecstatic experience, with the thought having the character of revelation (sudden unveiling). Forgetting is part of the revelation. It conceals the eternal becoming, the absorption of all identities in being and the sudden transformation of the person to whom the thought of eternal return is revealed.

It is a far more psychological or personal understanding of forgetting, as the emphasis is placed on 'experience'--on Nietzsche's lived experience of the death of God and the reformulation of the self.

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Klossowski, Nietzsche & sick bodies

In earlier posts on the second chapter of Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, entitled, 'The Origin of the Semiotic of Impulses', I've mentioned how out of sorts I am with his interpretation of Nietzsche. I've drawn attention to his biographical approach, the dualism of bodily impulses versus the everyday coded consciousness, and the wilful ignoring of the process of evaulation.

Let's face it, I'm not a sympathetic reader of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. I am much more at home with Heidegger's interpretation, and I find reading the rest of the book an intellectual chore which I keep on putting off.

Here is a sympathetic reader----Joanne Faulkner from La Trobe University Melbourne. Her interpretation of Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche makes much more sense of Klossowski's than I have done, or could do. Joanne's reading emphases the relationship between language and its fabrication of the body, highlights the importance of Nietzsche as a philosopher of the body, and the way that Nietzsche places his life at risk for the sake of his experimentation with his writings, and the significance of Nietzsche's sick body for the doctrine of eternal recurrence.

Towards the end of chapter 2 Klossowski writes:

"We cannot renounce language, nor our intentions, nor our willing; but we could evaluate this willing and these intentions in a different manner than we have hitherto evaluated them---namely, as subject to the 'law' of the vicious Circle.

Joanne allows us to make sense of passages such as these with her insight that "the body invents language in order to deceive us about itself." I never saw this.

I understood that language and bodily impulse were in opposition and I had understood that willing and intention were linguistic fictions of the everyday codes of language that shaped consciousness. I thought that it was language deceiving us because it did not, nor could, grasp the chaotic warring bodily impulses.

Nor did I give much attention to the significance of Nietzsche's sick body for his philosophy. I understood that his need to maintain cheerfulness in the midst of sickness, wounds that needed to heal, convalesence and his thinking of growing strong through a revaluation of values and the sounding out of idols. I had interpreted this along the lines of Nietzsche working in the tradition of the classical Greek's medical conception of philosophy as a healing of what makes us sick.

But I couldn't really connect with Klossowski's insights into the way that Nietzsche's experience of his sick body linked to his understanding of his organic metaphysics. Joanne highlights this aspect of Kossowski's interpretation: through his sickness Nietzsche observes his body at war with itself and break down into its component parts. As his body broke down so did Nietzsche's consciousness and personality (sense of self) shaped by culture and society. Nietzsche sides with his body.

Joanne also highlights Klossowski's understanding of the way that Nietzsche connected his sickness and philosophy: sickness leads to a convalesence where the body husbands its energies and creates conditions for change and growth. Presumably this leads to will to power.

The limitations of Klossowski's approach remain--the literary institution's indifference to the philosophical tradition. So Nietzsche's engagement with a Darwinian and physicalist metaphysics is ignored. Yet Nietzsche engaged with these traditions as well as the experience of his sick body.

Still, with Joanne's text to converse with I can start reading chapter 3 of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.

another kind of thinking

What happens when thinking reaches a standstill in the present? And just goes round and round in a circle. Should we then remember past suffering to help us understand what disturbs us in the present?

A familar picture of the present. It is marked by a bad modernity---the bad and existing modernity of rational abstraction and the calculating, instrumental rationality embodied in our suburbs, shopping malls, and media. This is a modernity characterised by the domination of a narrow scientific rationality in intellectual life and the bureaucratic rationalization of our practical life to ensure the indefinite economic (capital) expansion. This has led to a radical disenchantment in which people are stripped of their power to rationally motivate and guide our practical orientation.

A Frankfurt School picture of a bad modernity based on the Enlightenment's principles of number, calculability, abstraction, utility, equivalence and identity.

What then of the past? Can it act as sign post for the present. Can we take our ethical bearings in the present from the suffering in the past? Can the gaze of remembrance illuminate the wildly leveling-off of progress in a neo-liberal modernization devoid of any remembering?

Max Horkheimer:

"Past injustice has occurred and is done with. The slain are really slain…. If one takes the idea of open-endedness seriously, then one must believe in the Last Judgment….The injustice, horror, and pain of the past are irreparable".

Since the Last Judgement is theology we forget the horrors of settler capitalism in Australia, or the suffering of the 1930s Depression, and move on. There is little point in dwelling on the past by remembering the dead. What's done is done.

Doing that kind of sober analysis is the role of a philosophical critique, which demystifys the historical narrative of a nation. Ideology critique removes the fog and spin to lay things clear before our eyes. There is a kind of historical repression or forgetting built into this ideology critique that strips us naked of historical clothing and ethical life. That kind of Frankfurt School discourse has an old-fashioned air, and it is marked by the failure of philosophy to reflect on its own failure and its own complicity in a bad modernity.

Is philosophy closed to hope? What of the idea of redemption? Can philosophy give voice to what has been rejected, discarded and dumped as unworthy in a bad modernity? Can it redeem the broken promise of modernity?

A philosophy of refuse that gives voice to the residues of freedom and happiness?

Walter Benjamin:

"The corrective to this way of thinking lies in the conviction that history is not only a science but also a form of remembrance. What science has "established" can be modified by remembrance. Remembrance can make the open-ended (happiness) into something concluded and the concluded (suffering) into something open-ended. This is theology; however, in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us from conceiving history fundamentally atheologically, even though we would hardly be able to write it in theological concepts that are immediately theological."

This leads to a weaving or piecing together what history has broken to bits through a remembrance; a remembrance that involves narrative reconstitution and our recuperation (healing?) though a public hearing of the testimonies of the victims.

The South African Truth in Justice Commission is an example of this.

It isn’t that the past that casts its light on the present as the historians often tell us; or that the present casts its light on the past as the economists intone; rather, an image is that in which the past and the now flash into a constellation." This is an image is that in which the residue of the past still lives, "bathed in new air."

An illustration. The image of the collapse of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Investment bankers and workers running for the lives amidst the dusty air. In those images we remember the modernist promise of utopia embodied in the towering US glass and steel skyscrapers of New York. That promise was irrecoverably lost in the piles of steel and glass that was then called ground zero.

The promise is a residue of the past. It---an ethical life worth having---is a promise that still lives.

Update:8 Nov.

There is a tacit ethical thinking in the above that says yes to what is good and no to what is bad. It says yes to the promise of modernity and no to the horrors of modernity. Yet, this different kind of thinking rarely explicitly discusses ethical theory, thereby leaving the ethical principles remained opaque, despite the promise of modernity referring to social justice, freedom and emancipation. There is an ethical vacuum on the left.

From what I can make of academic left on this issue those amongst the post-Marxian Left with Kantian sensibilities followed the pathway opened up by Habermas’s discourse ethics. Others looked to deconstruction for an alternative, and Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction (1992) filled the gap, with its replacement of Derrida’s formal “other” for Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomenology of the “Other” as a human face and site of infinite responsibility.

Deconstruction was seen to offer ethical guidance in its advocacy of anti-essentialist identity politics, and it was cited for normative justification in postmodern versions of feminism, queer theory and cultural studies.

What is forgotten in this different kind of thinking is the old Greek idea of the good life well lived.So we are left with the ravages of emotivism: "values" are understood as synonymous with subjective feelings. However “real” a thing it is that people hold certain “values,” the larger fact, according to this view, is that there is no objective basis for human opinions, which are themselves indistinguishable from tastes and feelings.

Adorno: remembrance

Auschwitz: a negative catastrophe.

Auschwitz is not just a historical problem, it is a philosophical one and a theological problem.

We have been here before under the theme of 'Auschwitz in Australia' in July of this year. But that thread petered out around my claim of the ecological blindness of negative dialectics and I would add, of European philosophy (apart from Heidegger) in general. So let us put the ecology Adorno and Heidegger relationship to one side.

I'm going to pick the thread up again from a different perspective: in terms of the remembrance of the suffering caused by historical catastrophe. How do we do this? How do we begin to remember what has been forgotten and normalizised?

For the Europeans Auschwitz is not only unique in the framework of Jewish existence. It is also unique in European history. Never before did a national state decide on, and carry out, the murder of an entire group of people, including women, the old, children, and babies using every way possible. They killed the people in an industrial way – Auschwitz was a factory.

The dead of Auschwitz should have brought upon the Europeans, and the Germans in particular, a total transformation Nothing should have been allowed to remain as it was. Yet what happened in Germany was that Auschwitz was not a turning point at all. After 1945 there was little sorrow for the victims, only sorrow for Germany's loss of national identity. The restoration of German society and the survival of the church as an institution were celebrated as heroic acts. After 1989, the year of the unification of Germany, Auschwitz is threatening to become only a fact of history.

Adorno forsaw this evolution of normalisation. He wrote in Minima Moralia in 1944:

"The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' – as if the rebuilding of culture was not really its negation – is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for?"

Something similar has happened with the pre-industrial destruction of the Aborigines by white British settlers. It has been normalized and forgotten.

The fine old colonial buildings that we now celebrate as cultural heritage and our pastoral/settler histories are based on aboriginal dispossession and murder. The latter is forgotten. History starts from building white society in the wilderness.

To resist these developments we need to develop an anamnestic culture which keeps track of, and remembers, the forgotten victims. As Adorno says the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition to all truth.

A question: Does the French turn to surrealism, the unconscious and becoming help us develop an anamnestic culture that reconnects us with an ethical life?

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Heidegger & freedom

An interesting paper on Heidegger and freedom by Craig Nichols, which shows that Heiodegger worked with a positive conception of freedom inherited from German idealism.

This helps to counter the concentional view of Heidegger as a fundamentally un-political philosopher, one whose post-rectorial Nazi career was marked by "total withdrawal." This interpretation misses the deeply political nature of Heidegger's work after 1935 and it simplifies the extraordinarily complex thought path of a major thinker.

deleuze, becoming life

The more I read of Deleuze the more congenial I find him compared to the readings of Bataille and Klossowski. Deleuze has seen the way that Nietzsche breaks with Platonism, develops a metaphysics of becoming in the form of will to power and places an importance on the body.

I'm comfortable with it because Deleuze is keenly aware of the Heideggerian emphasis on ontology in Nietzsche and radicalizes it through life striving to preserve and enhance itself through connecting with other bodies. For all Deleuze's anti Hegelianism it is desire driving the expansion of life along.

a surrealistic impulse

This European image by Miro looks as if it could be easily situated within Australian surrealism and culture:


Joan Miro, The Farm, 1921-1922, Oil on Wood

The painting has the unsettling quality of something observed (19th century colonial buildings of pastoralism) and, at the same time, something dreamed of or remembered (a life of play and leisure in the landscape).

It is an expression of a divided consciousness and the aesthetic indeterminacy of Miro who sank into his art the oppositions of his subjectivity: Catalan and Parisian, traditionalist and Cubist, naif and cosmopolite.

So we have a fractured or split subjectivity.

That is us. We are schizophrenics out for a walk in a consumer society shaped by instrumental rationality, rather than neurotics lying on the analyst's couch.

The surrealistic impulse is the flow of desire, a self in flux, a self in becoming. Life is a flow of becoming.The liberatory impulse is the unrepressed gratification of sensual desire with its promise of a guiltless and nonrepressive way of life. The sign of that life of liberated instincts is childhood.

It is a very seductive image of redemption.

a touch of surrealism

In 1924, Miró met André Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and other participants of the Surrealistic group, in the year the first Surrealist Manifesto is published. This movement explores the confusion at the border of the states of dreaming and reality, and it places mundane objects in an unusual circumstance in order to shock the observer.

The surrealist concern is with the fusion of the two states, dream and reality and it appeals to Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. This was interpreted as the idea that imagination lead to the truth of repressed unconscious thoughts. So the Surrealist were searching for a truth of one's internal desires and passions through their practice of automatic writing that expresses their unconscious desires.

Miró executed several paintings in the surrealistic vein, including Harlequin's Carnival:

Joan Miro, Harlequin's Carnival, 1924-25.

This created a world of boneless, flowing, amorphous creatures, which freely change their shapes and position in the space and universe. Figures and objects, a fish, an insect, a ladder, flames, stars, cones, circles and spheres, all have real objects, but on the canvas they are swinging colored shadows celebrating a holiday.

Could this not be a radical impulse for philosophy outside the academy given this academic closure and the moral conservatism in our public culture? A philosophy that would connect to, and address, the philosophical heritage of surrealism whilst avoiding the irrationalism constructed by the rationalist world-view inherited from the philosophy of the Enlightenment?

What would that heritage be? A romantic sense of a fascination with enchantment and the marvellous, as well as with the spellbound aspects of modern consumer cultures and societies? Liberty as desire unbounded? Hegel's unhappy consciousness? The experience of a self divided against itself?

Should we accept the way Habermas constructs surrealism. As an "aesthetic phenomenon," wherein "the concentrated dealings with itself of a decentered subjectivity set free from the everyday conventions of perceiving and acting; onwe which promises us some kind of release from the tyranny of the instrumental rationality which has strangled the spirit, crushed desire and fragmented modern life.

"Modern art alone can communicate with the archaic sources of social integration that have been sealed off within modernity." Does this lead to a materialist psychoanalysis based on the concept of the autoproductive unconscious, which is a desiring-machine in a universe of desiring machines; an autoproductive desiring-machine that is a contentless, non-moral force, like the Freudian id?

Is this not the world of Deleuze, the Breton of the First Manifesto, surrealism in general and Klossowski?; a world that posits the unconscious as the primary reality which must be allowed to express itself. The freeing of the unconscious has the same goal for both surrealism and Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus: an expression-production freed from preconceived cultural ideas, or more particularly from capitalist-bourgeois culture.

The problem that I see with a free flowing unconscious is that Miro is disleading. Not everything woudl be play. What would also flow is a destructive negativity that will be expressed in violence to others because many of us have lived damaged lives since childhood. A capitalist socail formation has engraved its own way of way of being on our bodies.

That destructive negativity can be overwhelming to live with since its constant destruction disintegrates the normal ego. That can make sharing a life very difficult and surrealism can led to a romantic celebration of the life of the mentally ill or disturbed for their "insights."

Is the end to be achieved the dissolution of ego and a free flowing unconscious?

Derrida, Heidegger, Spirit#4

This post picks up from the previous post on this topic. Heidegger had argued that the university could help to set off a history transforming revolution in philosophy and he argued that there was a need to reform education as an integral part of this ontological revolution in philosophy. Philosophy is an untimely questioning.

The thread is working off Derrida's Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. This has been read in association with Ian Thomson's 'Heidegger and the Politics of the University' and Derrida helping to set up the International College of Philosophy in order to enable philosophy as a discipline to discover new themes & new problems, which had had no legitimacy and which were not recognized as such in the established universities.

If Australia had developed something akin to an International College of Philosophy, then there would have have been more of radical questioning of modernity and its culture. The moment has gone. Cultural conservatism has re-established itself as the universities become engineered as business institutions. So we are left with pockets, niches and enclaves of resistance and questioning.

In the Of Spirit text Derrida comes to terms with Heidegger's Nazi connections through reflecting on Heidegger's use of the term "Geist." Derrida is critical of Heidegger's conception of historicity as fate or destiny because of the contamination of spirit by (German) nationalism. Derrida interprets Geist in terms of the destiny of the west as a spiritual force and argues that the price of the latter strategy is contamination by the racism and the biologizing of 'blood and soil.' Heidegger does not deconstruct Geist.

Fair enough. There is is always a returning or a haunting in a national culture, especially the culture of the German people in the 20th century. So there is a need to engage in deconstruction of culture: to deconstruct this totality in favor of loosening it up in terms of diversity, disruptions, fissures. In stressing national destiny, rebirth and “Volkish” culture without engaging in a process of deconstructing Geist, Heidegger is seen to align himself intellectually with the idea of “cultural renewal” advocated by the Nazis; the Nazi control of the university, the politicization of science, and the submission of the German university to the Nazi state.

Then things can really take off. Consider this Weekly Standard article by Waller R. Newell, which connects Heidegger to European postmodern leftism to This kind of linkage is saying that we understand the Islamic fundamentalism of a Osama Bin Laden through the work of Heidegger. Behind Islamic fundamentalism sits Heidegger.

For a commentary on this kind of intellectual history read Enowning.

What is missing from Derrida is an engagement with the specifics of Heidegger's questioning: a questioning of our understanding of the metaphysics of modernity, which shapes and enframes our historical mode of being.

What is also missing from Derrida's account is any conception of place. Our experience and identity is grounded in place and this would then shape our understanding of being, the disorientation of modern thought and existence and the history of our understanding of being.

What Derrida does do is to turn to Heidegger's 1935 lecture, An Introduction to Metaphysics where Heidegger connects questioning to metaphysics to history, spirit to world and to the darkening of the world.

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