Comments have been turned off due to very heavy, computer generated comment spam over the weekend. The poker was flowing in at around 2000 comments a day. It was overload. Things had to be shut down whilst we install more anti-spam sofware.
In the meantime comments can be emailed, and I will incorporate them into the post as updates. In the light of this spam attack I have posted some comments made by Chris with respect to Blanchot. They are too good to be buried away in the comments of an old post.
Chris says:
"With Blanchot we are stepping outside the literary institution. More polemically, Blanchot exhibits a kind of contempt bordering on disregard for "culture," which he characterizes in one essay (can't recall which one, will look later) as simply a "storehouse." To "map" this, so to speak, I'd urge a close consideration of what he says is the function of the "image" in "Two Versions of the Imaginary" in Space of Literature. It "humanizes" the formlessness of the nothing, according to Blanchot; it provides a border, a shape, a sense of definition that provides a false sense of security and situatedness in time and space. Culture, which I'd probably argue is very much a production of the imagination (the productive imagination, in the Kantian sense even), performs a similar function.
I don't have a lot of time right now to go into this further, but there is a marked Kantian dimension to Blanchot's project, and he speaks admiringly of Kant: "just as Kant's critical reason is the examination of the conditions that make scientific experimentation possible, criticism is implicated in the search for that which makes the experience of literature possible" ("Lautreamont and Sade"). But at the same time, it is not a strict Kantian or neo-Kantian undertaking. Blanchot clarifies his allusion to Kant this way: "the word 'search' (recherche) ought not to be understood in its intellectual sense but rather as action taken at the heart of and with an eye toward the space of creation." ("Lautreamont and Sade")
At the risk of reduction, Blanchot's question is concerned with the question of the possibility of literature. Not 'what is' literature, as Sarte asked, but rather, 'how is literature possible'. The short answer: it's not, and yet it *is,* it exists, nonetheless.
To get a hold on why literature is a space of crisis, and why it is also valueless, a reading of Blanchot's essays on Kafka may help. And, indirectly, this may help with the "being jewish" question in this post. Again, a short point: in the Judaic tradition, at least as Balnchot understands it, and as he finds in Kafka, literature is a kind of transgression, a break with the Book -- here the Talmud. In a manner of speaking, there already exists A Book in judaism, and there is no need for another. And to try to write another is at once a violation, and also an impossibility, to which Kafka devoted his entire existence.
At some very deep level there is a connection to be discussed between, to borrow the phrase Gary used, the "mode of being of literature" and ... being Jewish."
Okay let us try this out with respect to Bataille after reading a bit of Blanchot. I'm picking up Blanchot's idea of limit experience.
Bataille is concerned with a limit experience: he is trying through his daily experience to reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living. By this is meant that he is trying to reach what lies at the limit or extreme.
Hence all the emphasis on the maximum amount of intensity and on the mystical impossibility at the same time.
How does Bataille do this? In On Nietzsche he grasps the significance of daily experience, not to reaffirm the fundamental character of the subject; but rather to "tear" the subject from itself. This is done in such a way that the subject is no longer the subject as such. We arrive at a state that is completely "other" than itself, in the sense that we arrive at the subject's death, annihilation or dissociation.
This process of tearing or de-subjectifying is a "limit-experience" as it tears the subject from itself so that it is no longer a subject.
Why do this? I'm not sure why one would want to live this way. Is it to prevent me from always being the same? However, it does seem to be what Bataille is doing.
The 2nd part of Blanchot's book, Infinite Conversations, is called 'The Limit-Experience' I have little idea what this means. Nor is there an introduction to this section. It is just a title for a collection of essays. A naive reader like myself comes into this text cold. Within this part of the book there is subsection entitled 'The Indestructible', which starts with an essay called 'Being Jewish' and ends with one called 'Humankind.'
I connect. It is the anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. People at the UN are saying never again:
Given this response at public opinion, and this kind of writing about the long shadow cast by Auschwitz by Julie Szego about the Jewish experience in Australia, I decided to read the essay. This essay might be one way to connect Blanchot to concerns in the Australian grain.
I thought that it might also be pathway into Blanchot's literary space that is the locus of an anonymous, unmasterable, unspeakable experience. I suspect that this space is marked by death. Presumably death is a limit or a boundary, and the beyond of the limit of death is nothingness. This is the outside of language, writing and writing human experience.
If this is so, then writing becomes a problematic activity. If the writer uses words connected to the world, then cannot express an unspeakable experience. That would be outside the limit of human experience and writring it would be an impossible goal.
I'm going to put that poetics stuff to one side, as I am more interested in limit-experience as an attempt to reach the other, the outside. Auschwitz would be a classic example of a limit experience would it not? Do we not confront the capacity of writing to represent the experience of the holocaust here and come up against the limits of literature?
So what does Blanchot say in the 'Indestructible' essay ?
The 'Indestructible' essay is about 'being Jewish.' It starts off thus:
"The Jew is uneasiness and affliction. This must be clearly said even if this assertion, in its indiscreeet sobriety, is itself unfortunate. The Jew has throughout time been the oppressed and the accused. Every society, and in particular Christian society, has its Jew in order to affirm itself against him through relations of general oppression .... Being Jewish would be then ... essentially a negative condition; to be Jewish would be to be from the outset deprived of the principle possibilities of living...."
"Still, is Jewish existence only this? Is it simply a lack? Is it simply the difficulty of living that is imposed unpon a certain category of men by the hateful passion of other men? Is there not in Judaism a truth that is not only present in a rich cultural heritage, but also in living and important for the thought of today--even if this thought challenges every religious principle?"
"If the Jewish community appears sometimes overly protective of Israel, it is because the collective carries the same baggage that I carry as an individual. It is a bundle of shameful, primal fears - the whispering voice that says: "You cannot protect your own children." In Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, you stand in a dark room of tiny lights, like stars in the night and listen to the endless names of children who perished in the Holocaust. It gives expression to an infinite, devastating grief that I feel in my darkest moments when those names merge with mine, with my sister's children and now with that of my own baby daughter."
Suprisingly, Blanchot says that the positive aspect of the Jewish experience --being Jewish---is that:
"...the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the expereince of strangeness may affirm itself close to hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak."
Maybe. Is that not a very European perspective. One rooted in the 20th century.
What about being Jewish today in the Australian diaspora? Are not Australian Jews comfortable living in Australia and have little desire to uproot themselves to go wandering and live in Israel? They are comfortable in Australia, settled in a place, rather than being in exile or in a state of wandering. Australia is home and a comfortable at that.
Why go wandering? Re read Julie Szego's Auschwitz's long shadow.
That is about all I can connect to in Blanchot's essay. There are several pages on Jewish religion and reading the meaning of the history of the Jews through Judaism that pass me by. Things look up in the next section called 'Humankind', where Blanchot considers being Jewish in terms of life in a Nazi concentration camps described by Robert Antelme,
Is this the best example of being Jewish? The only one?
Blanchot says:
"The man of the camps is as close as he can be to powerlessness.All human power is outside him, as are existence in the first person, individual sovereignty, and the speech that says'I'.. And yet this force that is capable of everything has alimit; and he who literally can no longer do anything still affirms himself as the limit where possibility ceases: in the poverty, the simplicity of a presence that is the infinte of human presence."
Bear with me as I'm trying to get a handle on Blanchot.
If Nietzsche and Derrida are philosophers of the fragment (ie., Nietzsche writes a poetics of aphoristic compactness, whilst Derrida produces a highly-styled fragmentary and interrogative treatment of marginality and presence),then is Blanchot a writer of the fragment?
Does Blanchot follow Nietzsche and Bataille in forgetting the world of Apollinian order and reason, and remembering the world of Dionysian suffering?
Two quotes written by Timothy Clark about Blanchot taken from the Literary Encyclopedia:
"Literature fascinates Blanchot as a site of irreducible strangeness and resistance to conceptual thought. Blanchot's critical thinking re-engages the old dispute between poetry and philosophy. The mode of being of literature eludes notions of strict essence, evaluation or weighing, in terms of its supposed truth or falsehood. The space of literature is not one that can feed into any sort of thinking in terms of cultural monuments, human values or edifying reflection. It is a space of crisis and the dissolution of certainty."
Why would literature be a space of crisis? Are we stepping outside the literary institution? Calling it into question? Why is lterature a resistance to conceptual thought? Does not literature use words and them together in some fashion? Or by conceptual thought do we mean 'Theory'?
And why is literature disconnected from values? Is not the space of writing (as poesis) circumscribed by that of philosophy?
My gut feeling, that we are standing on the threshold of a naive romanticism, is dispelled by the next quote:
'In many ways it is possible to read Blanchot's poetics as a radical continuation of that strain in post-Kantian aesthetics that stresses the irreducibility of the art work to any system of rules and concepts. For Blanchot, this is not to affirm some romantic concept of the inexpressible, or to affirm the relation of literature to some deeper principle of life that exceeds the rational (as in Schelling, von Hartmann or Nietzsche, or (closer in time and space) the revolutionary utopian affirmation of the surreal in the practices of André Breton and his followers) – all these anti- or supra rational rational principles still seem too recuperative and idealizing for Blanchot. The literary is rather “an object capable of rendering contradictory or meaningless any attempt to study it theoretically” ('The Novel is a Work of Bad Faith'(1947). Blanchot's work, in this sense, is a dismantling of classical and Romantic aesthetics, concepts of unity, work, meaning and form (one would call it a 'Destruction' in Heidegger's sense of the term were it not that Blanchot's work is often also in tension with Heidegger's own idealization of the poetic).'Though the Literary Encyclopedia treat Blanchot as a literary theoriest we are talking about philosophy---aesthetics---here.
So I take it that Blanchot is engaged in a dismantling of the categories of asthetic theory? Fair enough.
Hi Gary. I'm presently taking a week 'out' to soak up a lecture course at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, on Leo Strauss, the conservative thinker who is revered by many in the Bush administration. The course, convened by Matthew Sharpe (Deakin and MSCP), is concentrating on his intellectual work, but the political looms as a spectre in the background, and it is difficult to get beyond the influence that his thought has had on world events this century.
Strauss was a Jewish-German emigre, escaping to America from the Nazis, and taught (most famously) at The University of Chicago (but also New School for Social Research, as well as Claremont Men's College and St John's College). Some of his students (and their students) include Stanley Rosen (The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Plato's Symposium, Nihilism: a philosophical essay), Laurence Lampert (Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, Nietzsche and Modern Times, Nietzhsche's Teaching, Nietzsche's Task) (note the predominance of scholarship on Nietzsche), Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Peter Berkowitz, Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind), and Francis Fukuyama (End of History and the Last Man). There is a far more comprehensive list at www.Straussian.net, which is a kind of home base for Straussians.
While Strauss specialised in the study of ancient texts (most notably Plato), he held that philosophy in pre-liberal times was inherently political, and so cannot be read apart from a consideration of the political milieu in which it was written. In particular, he claimed that many philosophical texts had to tread a fine line between disclosure and persecution, concealing their political message from the many, while revealing it to the few who would be sympathetic. This gives rise to the esoteric/exoteric distinction so key to Strauss' method of reading: whereby the esoteric level addresses the insiders, and the exoteric keeps the outsiders out. According to Strauss, this 'writing between the lines' is motivated, to be sure, by an avoidance of persecution (a threat to which he was particularly sensetive, having escaped Nazi Germany)... but it is also motivated by the desire to preserve an order of rank, and to reproduce a social hierarchy between the many and those few special ones 'in the know.'
Curiously, a constant complaint of Straussians (Bloom is a good example) is that they are persecuted by a cultural elite, the 'politically correct' intelligensia. The strain of persecution is ironic, considering the clout that these people have in both the intellectual and political spheres, but seems to be necessary to their justification of themselves as a 'closed' community. As you can see by the picture of Wolfowitz at right, there is definitely a classical theme to their self-identification as well, which absolutely permeates the web site... and, as can also be gleaned from the site, they are relentlessly and aggressively right wing.
Update by Gary
We need some more text to counterbalance the photo that Jo published. This is a link to an account the reception of Strauss in Australia over at philosophy.com.
I've downloaded a text from the www.Straussian.net website about soem of the distinguishing aspects of a Straussian approach to political philosophy. These are:
"(1) A return to treating old books seriously, reading them slowly and with an effort to understand them as their authors did, rather than as History does.
(2) A recognition of the political nature of philosophy, that most philosophers who wrote did so with a political purpose.
(3) A recognition that the greatest thinkers often wrote with both exoteric and esoteric teachings, either out of fear of persecution or a general desire to present their most important teachings to those most receptive to them. This leads to an attempt to discern the esoteric teachings of the great philosophers from the clues they left in their writings for careful readers to find.
(4) A recognition of the dangers that historicism, relativism, eclecticism, scientism, and nihilism pose to philosophy and to Western culture generally, and an effort to steer philosophy away from these devastating influences through a return to the seminal texts of Western thought.
(5) Careful attention paid to the dialogue throughout the development of Western culture between its two points of departure: Athens and Jerusalem. The recognition that Reason and Revelation, originating from these two points respectively, are the two distinct sources of knowledge in the Western tradition, and can be used neither to support nor refute the other, since neither claims to be based on the other's terms.
(6) A constant examination of the most drastic of philosophic distinctions: that between the Ancients and the Moderns. An attempt to better understand philosophers of every age in relation to this distinction, and to learn everything that we as moderns can learn about ourselves by studying both eras."
In the Introduction of his Clueless in Academe Gerald Graff says that he is concerned to look at academia from the outside. He looks at the inherent difficulty of academic intellectual work, and the bafflement, shame and resentment (cluelessness) felt by students, the general public and the media when they encocunter that academic culture.
What they see is the impenetrability of the academic world, and they are made to feel dumb and clueless. This culture is seen to be elitist, at odds with a democratic education and overlaid with anxieties about class snobbery and inferiority.
Graff argues that academia reinforces this cluelessness by making its ideas, problems, language and ways of thinking more opaque, specialised and beyond normal learning capacities than they are or need be. This is a culture of argument committed to articulating ideas in public, listening closely to others, summarizing them in a recognizable way, and making your own relevant argument.
Argument literacy in a persuasive public discourse is the name of the game in academia, but the game is hidden and obscured amidst a disconnected clutter of subjects, disciplines and courses. The sharing of this public language of ideas and arguments is what seperates academics from their students and many Australians.
All this needs to be said. I am pleased that Graff is saying it, and I concur with what he is saying. It contextualizes the debates over Theory in academia, as it suggests that students find it hard to figure out what is going on. You know that something is going on. I could feel it in the air.
I could tell from the emotion, body language and words. Philosophy is not being done. It is an argument --just like one we have at home. The whole argument culture has been dropped, or rather it was the form and not the substance that was in play.
But what were they arguing about? I had no idea. I was even more puzzled when I realized that what was being said by both sides did not connect with the actual texts written by the names mentioned. And the combatants did not read the texts. Nor did they express any desire to do so. Nor did that matter. It was amazing.
Yet the combatants continued to squabble without acknowledging that they were trashing the academic culture they resolutely defended from the populist media attacks. It was all most odd. Even when a text came out that dealt with the philosophical issues of the conflict in a philosophical way--Habermas' The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity--few read it.They dropped the name though.
How come Habermas was not picked up? That always puzzled me. The material was too alien? Or too difficult? Habermas was not accepted as an analytic philosopher? Habermas was a German?
What I've found disappointing about Graff's text is that, judging from the material online, it does not deal with the issue of the conflicts 'Theory' at all. That is raised here; a review of Terry Eagleton's After Theory.
This text refers to the end of the golden age of cultural theory. "Theory" for Eagleton in this text means cultural theory: the theoretical innovations and insights of cultural theorists, such as Raymond Williams, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigray, Frederic Jameson and Julie Kristeva and the issues of gender, sexuality and colonialism.
What no Foucault? Did he not have a few things to say about sexuality, biopolitics and governmentality?
Okay, Eagleton doesn't really argue in a philosophical sense. His style is a brilliant and polished rhetoric that zig zags around witty discussions of different issues. He does not engage with a particular text of a particular figure and his comments are often glib. But it is good writing and it makes what is puzzling digestible and understandable; so he is a guide that enables you to get a handle on things.
In providing a step into an academic culture, and a guide to the issues and debates, Eagleton helps students overcome the state of cluelessness. That has to be a good thing.
Maybe the easy takeup of Eagleton, and the indifference to Habermas, highlights a dark side of academia. They are clueless about the conflicts between analytic and continental philosophy--but they are not going to let on. They are narrow specialists after all, not generalists, and they are comfortable with their niche.
Cultural conservatives in Australia often make a bit of fuss about something they call 'Theory', which is associated with political correctness, the cultural wars and the professionalization of academe. It has been a very messy and frustrating "debate."
Though I've never really understood what was meant by 'Theory' exactly, I roughly understand it to be related to the literary institution, the philosophy that is discussed in these pages, a theoretically informed criticism and philosophical aesthetics. From my expereinces in philosophy departments in Australia the resistance to 'Theory' often expressed an Anglo-American concern or anxiety to imported French and German philosophy (Hegel Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida etc) by lefty academics.
This historical understanding accords with Mark Kaplin's interpretation over at Charlotte Street. Mark says:
"...the objection (or 'resistance') to theory [more] typically ... refers to a phalanx of mainly ‘imported’ theories which have become increasingly influential in academia throughout the past 30 years or so. These are, very broadly: Marxism (in various guises), psychoanalysis and 'deconstruction'. If what unites these various 'theories' or schools is equidistance from (what had been) orthodox criticism, then 'Theory' would hardly be a particularly coherent or useful category.It might also seem that this concern with 'theory' is a rather Anglo-centric one, if one thinks of how, in Germany and France, for instance, theoretically and philosophically informed criticism has long been the norm. The brilliance of Benjamin’s analyses of Kafka and others, Adorno or Bloch’s thinking on and by literature, or the meditative essays of Blanchot, are all testimony to the rewards of a theoretically informed criticism."
As Armadeep Singh asks:
Do we really know what we're doing when we teach literature? ... More closely: It is often assumed unproblematically that [the] key goals in the English classroom are to enable students to 1) do close readings, 2) think analytically and critically, and 3) write persuasive arguments in support of their ideas. But all of these are actually things that should be defined more carefully than they usually are, and probably also questioned and contested. What does a close reading consist of exactly? Is there a philosophical or ethical reason why students should do them? And what is an argument exactly? Why is it so devilishly difficult to get students to develop and sustain them?"
I had read Graff's earlier text Beyond the Culture Wars several years ago,and from memory the 'beyond' referred to teaching the culture (canon) wars of the 1980s and 1990s in academia. He argued that it was necessary to bring the controveries to the centre of the academic curriculum in literary studies instead of trying to hide the disagreements about the canon and politics.
Now the responses to Graff's text go beyond the literary institution as they touch on Richard Rorty and continental philosophers such as Derrida. Philosophy is a part of the debate over Thoery. What are the concerns here?
John Holbo says:
"I accuse Theory of being a puffer fish. When you can see you are about to be attacked, inflate to several times your actual size in an attempt to intimidate the attacker into backing off .... We see the puffer in action when thinkers like Derrida imply that Theory is just philosophy, so that resistance to Theory = resistance to philosophy; and when thinkers like de Man imply that Theory is just attention to the nature of language, so that resistance to theory = resistance to language; and when Eagleton declares these days that Theory is just moderately systematic self-reflective study of a subject matter, so resistance to Theory = resistance to any kind of systematic thinking."
Those who do 'Theory' (continental philosophy) do not argue.
Why do I do that kind of translation?
Because of my cultural background that I mentioned above. In this context the conflicts were not taught nor the issues addressed. The no argument claim was a very standard criticism made by analytic philosophers about continental philosophy. The standard criticism said that those who write texts earmarked as continental philosophers o not argue. So we (philosophers) do not have to engage with them, as they are non-philosophers. We only engage with those who argue in the way that we do.
At the time (the 1990s) I've found this pretty self-serving, as it meant that the analytic philosohers did not have to do the hard yards and read the texts or engage with them. It was all about gatekeeping (power) not philosophy.
So it was always unclear what the issues between the analytic and continental schools were. The history of the toubled relationship was little guide (Kant is a pivotal dividing figure) as there was little philosophical contact. Rorty can be seen as the change agent here.
Times move on. We are now online. Before we step into these troubled waters we need to see what is Graff saying. We can do this as the Introduction and Chapter I of Clueless in Academe is online (as a pdf file).
I will take a closer look in next post.
I'm reading Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation. I have to admit I was attracted by the word 'conversation' in the title.
The text appears to be a collection of essays in the form of a dialogue with a friend (Levinas, Bataille?) or a barely present other (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Holderlin?) in a space between philosophy (ethics), poetry and literature. It is an interesting space, given the history of antagonism between philosophy and literature since Plato.It appears to be a space beyond the traditional (Mathew Arnold?) conception of literary criticism as the servant or handmaiden of literature.
Is this new creative kind of essay writing a philosophy that has become literature? Or is it an aesthetic philosophy as distinct from a philosophical aesthetics, such as Adorno's Aesthetic Theory?
I have not read The Space of Literature (1955), The Book to Come (1959) or Friendship (1971. So The Infinite Conversation(1969) is my first encounter with Blanchot. All I know about him is that he was part of the 1930-1940s French philosophical scene that was the philosophical roots of poststructuralism of the 1960s.
So I am going in naked with only a vague grasp of the history of literary criticism and theory. I accept the conception of literary criticism as a form of creative writing, the Nietzschean idea that such a form of writing can undertake the critique of metaphysics, and that we can read philosophical texts through the eyes of literary criticism.
Maybe, it is here in Blanchot's space between philosophy,poetry and literature that we can find a way to connect the individuals interior experience to society? That connection needs to be made given the opposition or conflict between Bataille's inner experience with what society conventionally recognizes as valid experience. I accept the conflict, but how do we deal with it if we do not want to take the mystical turn?
I came across this Blanchot quote via Spurious:
"We must not doubt that suffering weighs more heavily on us to the extent that our estrangement from religious consolations, the disappearance of the other world, and the breaking up of traditional social frameworks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering: a truth that consists in withdrawing from him the space that suffering requires, the little time that would make his suffering possible."That phrase---'the breaking up of traditional social frameworks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering'---is so Nietzschean.
Is this not what happened to the Aboriginal people in Australia? Have they not lost their traditional social and value frameworks? Do they not live in the terror of the immediate? Do they not suffer deeply as they live on the margins of our cities or try to rehabilitate and revitalise their devasted communities in the desert.
I guess that literature works in this nihilistic space. Doing what though?
Ali Rizvi over at the very informative Foucauldian Reflections has a good post on Foucault's aesthetic of existence. This has connections to Bataille and Nietzsche's close attention to self (subjectivity), and their Stoic conception of the joyous acceptance of the present moment imposed on us by historical fate.
This kind of philosophy is quite different from the university based modern philsophy, which is specialized, professional, and detached from life. Bataille and Nietzsche practiced their craft. They did not merely study it as many academic philosophers do today. Bataille and Nietzsche and considered philosophy a means of transformation of the subjectivity rather than a purely theoretical endeavor.
Ali understands Foucault's care of self as a:
"...self-fashioning without reference to any rules and predetermined patterns is what amounts to making our lives a work of art and giving style to one’s existence."
My concern here is not with Foucault's historical interpretations of the classical Greek and Roman texts. I am in no position to make judgements on this culture of the self in terms of scholarship. What I am interested in is the reshaping of the classial conception of philosophy as way of life so that it is of use to us in postmodernity.
On my understanding this is what Foucault has achieved with his genealogy of modes of subjectivation. So what does Foucault's aesthetics of existence as a self-fashioning mean?
Ali's interpretation is that:
"Foucault’s real interest is not in reviving Greek ethics but to see how it can help to continue essentially a Kantian project; and he thinks that the Greek idea of ethics as a work of art and giving style to one’s existence can help articulate an ethics which can not possibly be based on the knowledge of essences or on divine or natural law (due to Kant’s insights).... if the West does not believe anymore in natural law, if the West has discovered that practical reason or moral reason does not provide any preestablished norms and if the West still believes in the project of autonomy then what else can it do but to take the ethical enterprise as a work of art?"
Ali ends with a rhetorical question: If we accept the philosophical ethos of modernity(autonomy), then what else can we in the West do but take the ethical enterprise as a work of art? The answer is that there are alternatives to Foucault'reworking; different ways of re- working the classical conception of philosophy as a way of life that involves a working on oneself to remove those ideas, beliefs, values that make us sick.
Bataille for instance was not making himself into a work of art with a particular style. Neither was Nietzsche. Nor were either of them reviving Greek ethics per se. But they were working within a classical philosophical tradition, reshaping it and making it modern. That tradition, with its different schools (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cynicism and Pyrrhorism) involves a consensus conception of philosophy as a way of life with its grouping of categories; but within that there are different modes of reasoning; diverse literary genres, rhetorical rules and styles; different ways of dealing with what makes us sick; different ways of building on the pre-frabricated and pre-existing elements to construct new meanings.
This re-working is what Foucault is doing. But his is not the only way of doing it, as the texts of Bataille and Nietzsche attest. For the moment let us naively state the differences in terms of a style of life and a way of life.
Should we not, in the spirit of Foucault, be generating differences rather than formng a new unitary community?
I've gone back to Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle and its dualism of the chaotic unconscious forces undermining the agent's conscious identity. When we left it a while ago, we were struggling with the 2nd chapter on the experience of eternal return.
The strength of Klossowski's text is that reconnects in classical antiquity's conception of philosophy as "a calling," intrinsically connected to the living of life in opposition to the modernist conception that "severed life from thought."
As I naively understand it, the eternal recurrence of the self-same is a philosophical thought exercise aimed at redirecting our attention to our presently-existing world, and away from all the escapist, pain-relieving, heavenly otherworlds, (eg., Christianity).
Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence (sections 285 and 341 in the Gay Science) is formulated to situate ourselves in the world we presently live, since eternal recurrence precludes the possibility of any final escape from the misery of the present world.
The doctrine also functions as a measure for judging our overall psychological strength and mental health, since the doctrine of eternal recurrence is hard to accept and affirm.
Klossowski, in contrast, reads eternal recurence as a form of fatalism in which consciousness, meaning and goal are lost because there is no point on the circle that cannot be both the beginning and the end. The unconscious rules.
What then of Nietzsche, as a fragmented and fragile personality, living the philosophical life in struggling to shake off the effects of the old valuations and create new ones? Is this not a transformation of our understanding of the world we live and a transfornmation of the self?
Klossowwski does not connect the attention Nietzsche pays to himself and his subjectivity to Nietzsche living the philosophical life. He downplays Nietzsche's conscious attention and vigilance to what he does and is as a lived way of living through a reevaluation of previously created values and a creation of a new form of thinking, feeling, and seeing.
Or is the idea of Nietzsche, living the philosophical life wearing just another literary mask? What we have is Nietzsche living in a condition of ill-health and often intense physical pain. So why not a therapeutic Nietzsche creating a perspective that makes the chaos of life more sustainable by making life more joyful, even in difficult situations. Why not a philosophy that deals with many of the problems associated with mental illness.
Back to Bataille and his techniques of caring for his self in the diary/journal section of On Nietzsche, where he is philosophizing about his daily life.
The April-June 1944 section is introduced by a quote from Nietzsche about morality's self-destruction and needing ongoing strength and courage to leave the ancient habours to sail the open seas for new lands with a new mode of valuation.
In the third chapter Bataille, has the anguish blues bad, real bad:
"I'm ashamed of myself.There's something soft about me easily swayed . .... I'm not young anymore. A few years ago I was tough, filled with bravado, with a take charge attitude. It seems that's over with and was shallow, perhaps. Back then there wasn't that much risk in action and affirmation!My ability to bounce back seems gone for good: war crushes my hopes (nothing functions ouside of systems): illness is wasting me away; unrelenting anguish ends up playing havoc with my nerves; at a moral level I feel reduced to silence."
(p.84)
"Even if I'm older, sick and feverish, it's not in my nature to simply sit by and do nothing. I can't help endlessly accepting this infinitely monstrous sterility which fatique brings to my life...Inside of me everything laughs blindly at life...My depressed state, the threats of death, some kind of destructive fear that also shows the way to the summit--all these whirl in me, haunting and choking me...ButI am--we are---going to go on."
That ethos involves a way of life that is foreign to, and at odds with, the world of everyday living. It involves a perpetual conflict between the philosopher's effort to see things are in relation to European nihilism and the strugle against the old Christian valuations and the conventions and habits binding liberal society; a conflict between the life one should live as a free spirit and the customs and conventions of daily life. It is a conflict that can never be fully resolved.
Bataille is trying to live his daily life in a philsiophical manner, rather than refuse the world of social conventions or turn his back on it; or accept the everyday world of conventions and seek an inner peace. It is a life marked by tension, torment and anguish; by deploying techniques of self control and unrelaxing vigilance; and by faith in the possibility of self-improvement.
A comment by Ralph Dumain about the 'Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality' chapter in Adorno & Horkheimer's classic text, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, that has some bearing on Jo's previous post. on de Sade. I'll just post the remarks with minimal comment.
Dumain says:
"We soon come to the heart and soul (what an irony) of the chapter: a comparative analysis of Sade and Nietzsche (the bulk of which can be found on pp.96-102). The proto-fascist character of both could not be more obvious. Sade is unmistakably a creature of the Enlightenment. I believe that somewhere Horkheimer and Adorno want to argue that Nietzsche flows from this tradition as well, but here I see only the proto-fascist reaction against it. Now if the linkage is Enlightenment-Sade-Nietzsche-fascism, one could argue that fascism is contained in the seeds of the Enlightenment, but I am not satisfied with the conceptual structure that seems to underlie this system of linkages. The case of Sade, however, surely reveals the underside of Enlightenment, though just why, remains to be adequately clarified. To be sure, Horkheimer and Adorno go some distance. Sade's Juliette is revealed to be a Cartesian dualist (p. 108)! The nature of sexual pleasure enunciated by Juliette and that of pleasure in Sade and Nietzsche generally reveal a dualism between physicality and spirituality, intellect and affect. "Nietzsche recognizes the still mythic quality of all pleasure." [p. 106] This dualism justifies the ideology of cruelty argued by Sade and Nietzsche. It is also seen to be a patriarchal male logic that takes revenge on the weakness of "minorities" (women and Jews are named here) for having the nerve to circumvent their weakness by surviving (pp. 110-1)."
This interpretation implies that irrationalism (lebensphilosophie) is blamed on the dark side of the positivistic Enlightenment, rather than arguing that German fascism arises out of lebensphilosophie as the other of reason. I've never bought the latter intepretation.
Dumain says that means the Enlightenment's philosophy of instrumental reason, calculation, utility and domination of inner and outer nature was evident in de Sade's highly organized tortures and orgies. And it means that the German disaster of fascism was the outcome of a link between reason, myth, and domination implicit in the German Enlightenment thought since Kant and Hegel.
I'm not sure I buy that interpretation re Hegel but there it goes.
I'm still working on Sarah Kofman at the moment, in particular, her book Le Mepris des Juifs [Contempt for the Jews], in which she attempts to salvage Nietzsche from the interpretation of his work as proto-fascist, and, more importantly for Kofman, anti-Semitic. Kofman provides a 'survey' of Nietzsche's remarks about the Jews, and attempts to contextualise them in terms of the state of his identity, in relation to important figures in his life: his mother, his sister, and Wagner and Schopenhauer. She argues, roughly, that Nietzsche matured when he was able to renounce the anti-Semitic (amongst other things) attitudes of these 'forebears,' and finally came to identify himself as a Jew. As with many critics who rally to Nietzsche's defence against the nazi appropriation, Nietzsche's sister gets a bad rap in this book, and it appears that Nietzsche might not have suffered the maligning that he did, had it not been for his sister's presiding over his literary estate, controlling how his books were published, and publicising Nietzsche's work as proto-fascist.
My question to Kofman is, what is her stake in cleansing Nietzsche of the taint of nazism? I read her interpretation of Nietzsche as very much implicated in her own feelings of ambivalence regarding her 'Jewishness'. In the light of her Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (discussed in a previous post). Rue Ordener is an autobiographical account of the trauma she suffered during WWII, after her father had been taken to Auschwitz and she was divided between her mother and a gentile 'lady' who wanted to Christianise her--Kofman perhaps identified not only with Nietzsche's philosophical perspective, but also with his deep ambivalence regarding the Jews. In this respect, her cleansing of Nietzsche of any ambiguity regarding his position on the Jews, is also a cleansing of herself... And Elisabeth Nietzsche plays the part of the dupe, or 'scapegoat,' upon whose back their collective sins are heaped on their day of atonement.
I've also been reading an interesting collection of essays dealing with the relation of Nietzsche to nazism.
Daniel Conway presents an interesting argument, that Nietzsche's comments on the Jews must be read in the context of his cultural/political project of imperialism: that he saw the Jews as his raw material--or a 'leavening agent'--that would infuse Europe with the right starter-culture that would lead to a more expansive, imperial attitude. According to Conway, Nietzsche did not see the Jews as good in themselves--in fact, he saw them as
ultimately responsible for such world calamities as the "slave revolt in morality," the birth of Christianity, the fall of the Roman Empire, the decline of the Renaissance, the rise of the Protestant Reformation, and the outbreak of the French revolution... He goes so far as to propose "Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome" as his preferred "symbol" for the historical struggles that have collectively defined the identity and destiny of European civilization.
According to Conway, Nietzsche saw the Jews as a strong people, but was deeply suspicious, even fearful of them, and kept to the stereotypes in his understanding of them. The Jews are useful to Nietzsche only in so far as they collaborate with his plan to reform Europe, and this would require their assimilation into the European populace, and ultimately their end, as a 'people.'
Robert C. Holub also presents an interesting reading of what he calls "the Elisabeth Legend," with reference to the "Nietzsche Legend" that Elisabeth cultivated around Nietzsche. Holub's thesis is basically that, yes, Elisabeth did indulge in some small falsifications of Nietzsche's work--what amount to philological misdemeanors--but her influence on the Nazi appropriation of his works has been overstated, to the extent that Nietzschean scholars have conveniently been able to overlook the fascist potentiality of Nietzsche's texts altogether. Holub makes a case that the changes and omissions that Elisabeth made to letters and text do nothing to change the overall significance of his work: that her motive was most likely fairly domestic, that is, to exaggerate the closeness of their relationship, and to support her own animosities and prejudices regarding his other friends and acquaintances. As Holub points out, this is more of the order of exaggeration than falsification, as Nietzsche himself held these views at one time or another.
Although it may be grossly unfair to say that Nietzsche would have endorsed Hitler's platform--and indeed, he may even have vigorously opposed it in detail and spirit--it is important that Nietzscheans consider, and deal with, the elements of his text that can support a Nazi interpretation. It appears that a reluctance to get one's hands dirty drives the "Elisabeth legend", as well as the recuperation of Nietzsche as an advocate for the Jews... in a similar vein, what are we to make of images like this?:
Hauke Brunkhorst's Adorno and Critical Theory looks to be an interesting text indeed.
Ali Rizvi over at Habermas Reflections has dug up a review by Matt F. Connell in Contemporary Political Theory (1, 242-244, 2002) and posted two of Connell's comments.
Connell's first comment refers to Adorno and Horkheimer's classic Dialectic of Enlightenment text:
"In a critical move familiar from Habermas, Brunkhorst endorses their dark critique of totalizing enlightenment, but is keen to emphasize that it is open to correction, seeking to avoid what he sees as the pessimistic side of Adorno's negative theological critique, which runs the risk of going 'along with Heidegger and a broad stream of conservative cultural criticism. Critical theory falls back upon a negative philosophy of the history of decay.' (p. 75)"I'v always been wary of that critical move as it is based on a misreading of Adorno and Horkheimer's dialectical critique of enlightenment reason. This immanent critique does not fall back upon a negative philosophy of the history of decay.
That is a conservative discourse, not Adorno's negative dialectics, which works within the ethos of the enlightenment. For Adorno human history is an antagonistic unity in which advances are purely progressive and obstacles to progress not simple regresssive. The dialectic of enlightenment isa genuine dialectic not a simple logic of disintegration.
When are people going to start reading Habermas from the perspective of Adorno? When are they going to start reading Habermas' overcoming of the philosophical tradition critically,instead of just repeating it? Why are these commentators so under the spell of the Habermas's philosophical narrative of modernity?
Adorno does not risk going along with Heidegger. Adorno was deeply critical of Heidegger, even if he misread him. He bashed him up continually, especially in Negative Dialectics. Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity is concerned with Heidegger's debasement of language (jargon), and its emptiness of real content filled by catch phrases (commitment, curiosity, idle chatter, dignity, and death) of indefinite meaning. These serve a duplicitous ideological function in the manner of advertising slogans.
There is a fundamental paradox in Heidegger: he tries to maintain the ethos of the mythic (the sentimentality about pre-industrial rural life) in a demythologized world of capitalist exchange value. Adorno analysis of the relation between wholeness and death (involving also the "they" and exchange), uncovers the fascist violence at the root of Heidegger's entire philosophy (a reactionary lebensphilosophie).
Connell's second comment is more interesting as it breaks new ground:
"For me, Brunkhorst's most extensive and valuable contribution is his attention to the complex of disputes on Adorno's legacy in modern critical philosophy, a complex which forms the philosophical background to many of the issues of cultural theory. Different lines of theoretical relationship to Heidegger is crucial here, and Brunkhorst's book is dominated by an effort to clarify Adorno's complex theoretical relationship to Heideggerian thought, with Brunkhorst being careful to make clear the commonalities as well as the differences. Brunkhorst develops his analysis of Adorno and Heidegger into an interesting series of juxtapositions with post-modern, analytical and pragmatic schools of thought, carefully unpicking (sic) a range of affiliations which place aspects of Adorno close to pragmatism (especially Dewey) and postmodernism (especially Rorty), whilst being well aware of the areas of distance which are emphasized more strongly by other receptions of Adorno."
It has been broached a couple of times here at philosophical conversations with little progress being made on sorting through the issues. I recall that I was unable to find mucch on the net at the time of the posts.
So if Brunkhorst's book is indeed dominated by an effort to clarify Adorno's complex theoretical relationship to Heideggerian thought then it is an important text. If Brunkhorst is careful to make clear the commonalities as well as the differences, then it is well worth reading.
Update
I find this phrase by Connell misleading:
"Brunkhorst develops his analysis of Adorno and Heidegger into an interesting series of juxtapositions with post-modern, analytical and pragmatic schools of thought, carefully unpicking (sic) a range of affiliations which place aspects of Adorno close to pragmatism (especially Dewey)"
Dewey was an Enlightenment optimist with technocratic ambitions at solving social problems. Admittedly, this optimism was tempered by his faith in democracy, and his hints about the growing threat of technocracy to democracy. However, Deweyan pragmatism is a custom made tool for "tuning up" a technological culture, not for criticizing it. Dewey accepts the domination of nature (the ecosystems we are a part of) by an instrumental reason.
Bataille's On Nietzsche is about the therapeutic value of writing. That is how I now approach this text that has given me so much trouble in reading. Pierre Hadot puts his finger on why I was having the problem.
In his text Philosophy as a way of Life Hadot makes a distinction between the discourse of philosophy taught in the universites as an abstract and theoretical activity and philosophy as a art or form of living ---as a way or mode of life. I've been trained by a state-financed educational institution in the discourse of philosophy that still bears the scars of scholasticism. I had to master that discourse as part of my training. Bataille is practising philosophy as a form of living, and he is concerned to transform himself and his way of life. Hence the mismatch.
Nietzsche was also practising philosophy as a form of living,for that matter. He was steeped in Greek philosophy, was deeply engaged in radically transforming our way of life, and was living a philosophical life.
On Nietzsche works within the literary genre of a spiritual notebook, known as a hypomnemata. Foucault says:
"The hypomnemata are to be resituated in the context of a very sensitive tension of that period. Within a culture very affected by traditionality, by the recognized value of the already-said, by the recurrence of discourse, by the 'citational" practice under the seal of age and authority, an ethic was developing which was very explicitly oriented to the care of oneself, toward definite objectives such as retiring into oneself, reaching oneself, living with oneself, being sufficient to oneself, profiting by and enjoying oneself. Such is the objective of the hypomnemata: to make of the recollection of the fragmentary logos transmitted by teaching, listening, or reading a means to establish as adequate and as perfect a relationship of oneself to oneself as possible."
This kind of writing is a process of liberating oneself from the burdens of the past, (a transcending the old Bataille) in order to concentrate on the present moment. With Bataille this process of liberation (or transgression) often comes close to a culture of the self, a relationship of the self to the self.
This kind of reworking of the classical tradition in ethical thought as practices of the self offers one way to address the moral vacuity of modern culture. And just to finish. As Foucault's interpretation of the practices of the self were too aesthetic in orientation, so Bataille's are too mystical.
I want to come back to an earlier post on Stuart Elden paper 'There must be some Architectonic: Heidegger and Aristotle on the Politics of Phronesis' (listed under works in progress)that I was exploring before Xmas.
I wrote here that
"Though Heidegger recovered a practical reason in Aristotle's texts he foregrounds the ontological dimension, downplays the ethical, and forgets about the link between the ethical and the political. The ethical is buried. It-- the practical concern to live well-- is what needs to be recovered."
The ethical as the concern to live well is not understood as a set of moral rules or as a moral system; it is a certain kind of life, a philosophical art of living, as the practices of transforming the lives of individuals.
A quote from the Daily Telegraph about French intellectuals:
"What would the French do without their intellectuals? Holding court in the cafe rather than the lecture hall, surrounded by female admirers, they philosophise, glass in hand and cigarette smouldering, less to instruct than to entertain. Ever since Jean-Paul Sartre, this archetypal figure has held the Gallic imagination in thrall......Most French intellectuals of the last century got away with toadying to totalitarian tyranny, or with corrupting younger generations, or with obscure and pretentious charlatanry - often all three. Levy's chief crime, for his peers, is to be too rich, too famous, too bourgeois. That, at least, is progress."
The same as it did when the charge was levelled against Socrates.
Asking too many questions?
Hi Gary. It's interesting the way that the violence seems naturally to lead to questions of masculinity. Eruptions of violence--from Bataille to Fight Club--seem inevitably to raise questions about masculinity. I loved Fight Club (the book is also worth a read, although I've found Palahniuk's others disappointing), but a lot of my other feminist friends were uncomfortable about it... I thought Marla was as interesting a character as the guy whose alter-ego was Tyler Durden, and it seemed that Marla's violence was for the most part ignored.
The short piece I wrote that you posted to the blog the other day was originally presented to a group of women's studies postgrads and staff at La Trobe University. It left everybody pretty much with nothing to say in response... except my supervisor who (thankfully) 'got it,' and a women's studies lecturer who said "it's a very masculine desire that Bataille is dealing with"... (ie. this is a bad thing)... Basically, she was saying that it's violent (with all that talk about laceration), and so it must be masculine. This is a very nice 'pearl set' image of femininity that we get here though. Why do 'femininity' and 'violence' have to be placed at opposite poles? This suggests a kind of idealisation of 'woman' that I think is more problematic than the other option, that violence is also an integral part of feminine sexuality.
A social-worker friend of mine suggested otherwise, that in fact 'laceration' is very much a feminine preoccupation... that women 'cut themselves up' at the drop of a hat when in distress, whereas men who are acting out are more likely to surf moving trains or jump off things.
In that case, we could even conjecture that Bataille is acting from a position of femininity... feminising himself in relation to Nietzsche... something that I think might trouble a lot of feminists, but perhaps that's what's needed if we're to be able to think about women's desire not just as 'sugar and spice and all things nice'.
Masculinity crisis. What is it?
There has to be one, judging by the spam about viagra as the new technology (magic erection pill) that will repair shattered masculine subjects who so desire technologically enhanced bodies. The body machine has broken down.
Is it a paralysis when it comes to addressing emotions and expressing feelings?
Has it got to do with men's estranged relationships with their mother as psychoanlysis implies? Or as lack leading to excess. Or father/son relationships?
Probably all of the above.
Can the masculinity crisis be linked back to the surrealists? To Bataille? I reckon we can as the masculinity crisis involves transgressive male violence (including doemstic violence) and death (male suicide and killing raped women). Bataille is probably more useful than the moral panic that overwhelms us on the American crime and punishment shows circulating throughout free-to-air television.
Bataille writes in the diary section of On Nietzsche:
"In carnal love we ought to love excesses of suffering.Without them no risk would exist....Right away, the beloved gets strangely confused with me. Moreover--once seen the beloved becomes incomprehensible. All the pursuing, finding, and embracing of the person with whom I'm in love,what good does any of it do? I suspected all along...But without first drowning my anguish in sensuality, how could I have endured these torments of desire?" (p.71 & 72)
Today the masculinity crisis is generally seen as a negative reactive response to feminism, to the growing independence of women, and to the blending of gender roles. It is seen in terms of an anxiety about the "effeminisation" of males and gayness a fear of a disturbing or disturbed femininity and the need for a recuperative space to reaffirm male masculinity along conventional 19th century lines of 'female difference/male dominance'.
This account is partly right, I suspect. Some men certainly do want to retain control over women and they are more than willing to pay for being men.
Maybe the masculinity crisis is something deeper? Something that we can link back to Bataille's split subjectivity, pornography and tormented desire?
This is one account. It asks:
"How do men win their masculinities now? Therein lies the true crisis: the measure of a man has changed, leaving many young men without a roadmap to establishing their identities and without clear-cut ways to validate their masculinity."
If it is about masculinity, then it is about sexuality, bodies, desire and the recognition of our object of desire as another subject. As Bataille says:
"Pain flows from the beloved's obstruction of that love. The beloved turns aside---is different from me. But without this difference---my recognition of this beloved would have been in vain. Identity still remains in effect. Only when our response to desire remains incomprehensible is that response true. A response that is understood destroys desire."
It suggests that we look at the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives. With Bataille the focus is on the lived experience of sexual desire and the practices that shape that desire which are an aspect of the gender order.
What is pushed into the background is the power relations involving the subordination of women and the domination of men and the gender division of labor whereby men gain from unequal shares of the product.
Whilst working to upgrade the template and put the plugins into place to filter the automatic comment spam (hopefully things should be working after this weekend) I found myself thinking about my violent and hostile reaction to Bataille's On Nietzsche, my understanding of Bataille as a subject divided against itself, and the masculine subject.
On Nietzsche is a difficult text because it violently forces a very different kind of reading upon me; one completely at odds with the theoretical philosophical one I'd been trained in. It was a violent reading in that On Nietzsche forces an engagement with the body and the core of my subjectivity. Reading becomes a kind of laceration as it activates the fear of going crazy and the desire for mystical communion with God through wounding oneself.
Reading involves a loss or dissolution of (ego) boundaries.My own reading was marked by ambivalence (to the mysticism); dislike (Bataille's subjective violence); contempt (Bataille's construction of a mythical Nietzsche): hatred (I detested Bataille's obsessions or psychosis): and loathing (there is too much laceration, bleeding and shit). It was like engaging with the texts of a madman in a mental institution.
How was the subject divided? How was Bataille the subject divided in On Nietzsche?
All I could think of was Bataille desiring the death of self through an intense mystical fusion (union?) with God (or Mother?) whilst, at the same time, Bataille is struggling to maintain his ego boundary in order to function as a man within a patriarchal-capitalist society.
Then Jo Faulkner sent me her short piece on Bataille's On Nietzsche and his bodily engagement with Nietzsche's texts. It usefully introduces object relations psychoanalysis (Kleinian) into reading Bataille; it gives us a reading that develops the split or divided subject thesis.
If, as Bataille holds, communication with an other involves both a wounding (a loss of self to the other and a risk of contagion from the other, then Bataille opens himself to Nietzsche's wounds (his madness) and he partakes himself of Nietzsche's suffering.
This approach captures both Bataille's mythical relation to Nietzsche, the state of rapture and dissolution, the breaking down of the subject's autonomy, and the subject's wounded relation to others.
Do take time to read Jo's text.
This really is an identify of the human being with the machine.It indicates a shift from seeing the universe as a mechanism, with human beings a partial exception because of their consciousness, to seeing human beings in the form of a machine.
Francis Picabia presents woman as spark plug in Portrait d'une jeune fille americaine dans l'etat de nudite, 1915.It is a portrait that bears no resemblance to the organic gendered body.
It is an equation of woman and machine. This is an odd and puzzling equation, given the traditional (patriarchal) mother/whore dualism.
What then drives the machine?What activates inanimate matter and makes it function as a machine? Well, men often see their cars as females, so I guess it is the man's desire that turns the machine on. the machine is forced into a representational function; the machines is the raw material against which the macho male ego is constructed. The male ego is then defended from threats to dissolve it. Men fear the dissolution of the ego.
If women as subjugated females have become machines---in terms of the male gaze---then what has happened to men?
What are the unconscious mechanisms at work here?
Hi Gary. Lee Bul's work looks interesting, and it touches upon Sarah Kofman's writings on Nietzsche, which I'm working on at the moment. Like Klossowksi, Kofman emphasises the movement of disintegration in Nietzsche's writings. Klossowski argued that Nietzsche had constructed himself by fashioning 'masks' of the great figures of history, philosophy, and mythology (Napoleon, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Dionysus, Christ... ), and that his breakdown involved his literally breaking down into these constitutive parts (when he signs his letters off under these names, for instance). Kofman treads a similar path in her 700 page (2 volume) study of Ecce Homo, Explosions, where she argues that Nietzsche constructs his own "fantastic genealogy" from these great figures, also replacing what he sees as his base German origins with Polish nobility. In the works that precede Ecce Homo, according to Kofman, Nietzsche confuses himself with these figures, but only so that, in Ecce Homo, he can then birth himself through them: he appropriates his mother's fertility, and fantasises a noble Polish genealogy on his father's side; his father "gets him pregnant," but it is Nietzsche who impregnates the philosophers whom he reads (investing himself within them), so that he can then reappropriate a better, stronger self (as the Uber-philosopher). Referring to the passage from the preface of Ecce Homo, "Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else," Kofman writes:
now if he is so afraid of being taken for someone else, it is because he "himself" took himself for "others" at first, went via many "others." Before reaching his height, he had to take numerous byroads and make many aberrant deviations, conceal himself in multiple hiding places and under multiple masks: for example, that of a philologist.
What is interesting about Kofman's work is that she also confuses herself with the figures she reads, taking on their mode of writing--their metaphors, turns of phrase, argumental structure--to the extent that it is difficult to find "Sarah" within the text. Reading other of her texts, such as her autobiography, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, one finds that she had endured terrible hardship during WWII, having lost her father to Auschwitz at seven, and then having to hide out in a house in Paris with her mother and a gentile woman, with whom she effectively replaced her mother (there was a very accrimonious custody battle after the war--the gentile woman won her, but then her mother sent some men to kidnap her).
She had a very confused upbringing, with respect to those parental relations that help us form that thing called 'identity,' and there are so many similarities between Kofman's autobiographical narrative and the narrative she gives to Nietzsche's identifications, that you start to wonder 'who' it is that she is writing about.
To return to the connection to Lee Bul, I also wonder if perhaps it is not easier for Klossowski and Bataille to talk about identity confusion than it is for Kofman, a Jewish woman, already at a disadvantage when it comes to doing philosophy (which admittedly is a very masculine discipline). Perhaps... so as not to leave all the provoking to Gary.
If I'm forced to engage with all this subjectivity stuff when reading surrealism, Bataille and Klossowski, then I'm going to read their texts in psychoanalytic terms of a male subjectivity in crisis and symbolic defeat in an technological shaped capitalist-patriarchal world. The more I read Bataille's diary section in On Nietzsche, and consider the way they construct their reading of a torn and fractured Nietzsche, then the more I interpret these guys as being screwed up real bad. They have split subjectivities to the point of disintegration.
Let me introduce technology into this with Metropolis a classic expressionist film about what Heidegger woudld call the technological mode of being in modernity. This takes the metaphysics further as it expresses the way that modernity ses human beings as a form of machine.
Metropolis is an industrial capitalist civilization.Underground we have the phallic industrial images of gears, pistons, generators moving in inexorable rhythms and repetition.The workers toil underground in the darkness for long hours. They toil as robots, their movements dominated by the mechanical rhythms of machines. The workers are enslaved by mechanisms that resemble giant ten-hour clocks. It is classic dystopian picture of technology.
On the surface we have a thriving metropolis, vast skyscrapers linked by aerial highways, huge stadiums and pleasure gardens, airplanes hovering between huge buildings and lines of cars that flow like streams below. This is a world of technological dynamism that set the futurists into such raptures.In this utopia technology is an empowering tool that benefits human desires and liberates the inhabitants for sensual pursuits and playful activity.
Metropolis also introduces the figure of the cybog:
These connect to the sculptures of the cyborg artist, Lee Bul. Or rather Bul's work refers back to the Maria-borg in Metropolis.
In an interview with Hans Ubrist Bul says:
"And while notions of femininity may appear to be changing with the advent of new technologies and new ideas and theories arising from those technologies, I still find that certain representations simply reinforce and continue traditional discourses about what constitutes femininity and images of femininity."
I'm not sure.
Bul would have the Maria-borg in Fritz Lang's Metropolis in mind? Did not the Maria-borg eventually prove to be subversive?
The narrative is simple. Metropolis is an authoritarian capitalist patriarchal society(women are excluded from the public arena)ruled by the capitalist controller Joh Fredersen.Fredersen, as the Master of Metropolis, and a mad scientist named Rotwang, devise a scheme to undermine the workers' liberation movement and to discredit its leader Maria by infiltrating the workers' ranks with an agent-provocateur, a cyborg-double of Maria. This scheme backfires when the Maria-borg, acting in defiance of its programming, leads the workers on a rampage to destroy the machines that enslave them. The female robot as a s machine-woman is more than a product of male industrial technology and male sexual fantasies because she transformed into a rebellious cyborg.
What then is the cultural significance of this cyborg figure? After all Hollywood represents cyborgs as invincible killing machines in films such as the Terminator and Robocop.
Peter Ruppert in 'Technology and the Construction of Gender in Fritz Lang's Metropolis' says:
"If robots are completely mechanical figures, and androids are genetically engineered organic entities containing no non-biological components, then cyborgs may be identified by the fusion of human beings with technology, 'a hybrid of machine and organism' as Haraway puts it."
Ruppert goes on to say:
"Crossed boundaries, in fact, distinguish the cyborg. Neither entirely human nor artificial, but a combination of the two, the cyborg problematizes all dualities and oppositions. For Haraway, a human centered universe rests on dualities: we fatally program every opposition into good/bad, positive/negative, male/female, real/artificial, analytical/emotional, natural/cultural, master/slave. These dualisms that structure our thinking and need to be supplanted. For when the boundary between human and artificial collapses, all other dualities also dissolve."<
/blockquote>
As the cyborg is a product of replication rather than reproduction, it defies the Oedipal process, and in so doing, it also defies the manner in which gender and identity are constructed,thereby challenging the patriarchal construction of 'otherness.' There is a transgression of the boundaries between human and machine and to challenge the construction of woman as male other. The cyborg acts as means for redefining difference as it an 'inappropriate' other---a fractured, hyphenated identity. The cyborg is a site of numerous dualities and differences that are in fluidic transgression.But if you locate the texts of Bataille and Klossowski about Nietzsche back into the modernist, expressionist world of Metropolis, then you can see the fracturing and distintegrating subjectivities of a masculine self divided against itself. Bataille and Klossowski's fascination with Nietzsche's descent into madness and mystical states arises from their male subjectivity being in crisis and symbolic defeat.
Well, that's how I'm going to read these texts. Bataille's diary section in On Nietzsche makes little sense otherwise.
BUL LEE, CYBORG RED (work in progress), 1997. Silicone, paint pigment, steel,160 cm high x 100 cm diameter at base.
I introduce the work of Lee Bul into the weblog for two reasons. The work is currently being exhibited in Australia, and it raises issues about the technological mode of being that we live within and are shaped by.
Lee Bul gained prominence in the late '90s with a series of "Cyborg" sculptures. These hybrid forms, composed of seamlessly fused organic and mechanical motifs, spoke to the increasingly tenuous boundary between body and machine. Lee's silicone cyborgs reference prosthesis, cosmetic surgery and monsters show fragmented female bodies with smooth, closed surfaces.
These hybrid of machine and organism---cyborg women---are a challenge to Bataille and Klossowski's conception of the body. Bul's female techno-bodies envision identities away from traditional discourse (of de Sade, Bataille and Klossowski)and the technological mastery heralded by patriarchy.
Yvonne Volkart says:
"These headless, one-armed and one-legged figures are not only abnormal, but deeply pornographic, forced into armour-like corsets that emphasise their waists, breasts and buttocks. This series refers visually to avantgarde western male fantasies of machine women and the femininity of machines (especially to Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Tinguely) as well as to the contemporaneous Japanese manga and Korean animes and the prevalence of young female cyborgs as sexy protagonists."
I've made mention of the idea of a French Hegel. Hegel means dialectics, or the balancing of opposites, or two opposed things, as suggested in Rene Magritte, Hegel's Holiday, oil on canvas, 1957.
Magitte's painting is a misreading of dialectics.
Magritte fails to capture negativity that drives the opposites to some sort of "resolution" or development. Hegel is about negativity, becoming and development as much as he about the balancing of opposities. Hegel's dialectical conception of progress, which allowed for conflict and reversal, provided a way to break with the positivist vision of a steady, linear progress.
Magritte's painting is a misreading. Maybe Hegel on holiday is a joke about no negativity in Hegel? The positive idealist Hegel? Magritte did not paint "ideas" since the purpose the painting was not the philosophy. It was the inherent poetry and mystery of the image.Magritte paints images not ideas.
And the French Hegel? How did the philosopher's understand Hegel?
My references to the French Hegel can be found here here and here and here.
My interpretation of the French Hegel is that it involves the conservative Encyclopaedia Hegel. The core of this interpretation focuses on logic, which to establish a systematic way of deducing the logical consequences of a set of concepts.This is the Hegel who has to to be rejected as part of the rejection of rationalism. The Encyclopaedia Hegel is the stuffy, super rationalist Hegel, who employs the unified Platonist notion of a closed, rigorous, totalizing reason. The emphasis is on the closure of the Hegelian dialectic in abolute knoweldge and the gobbling up all difference in negativity. Bataille certainly sees Hegel in terms of a closed rationalist system and he rebels against it in terms of inner experience.
Usually, the idea of the French Hegel refers to the renaissance of French philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s, which took up motifs from the Alexandre Kojeve's reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in his lectures at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes between 1933 and 1939. Kojeve reads Hegel, 'after Heidegger' and he finds Hegel's ontology of nature indefensible; reads Hegel in terms of History; and as a philosophy of death.
Kojeve's lectures gave an existential reading of Hegel, influenced by Jean Wahl and Koyre, that emphasised the earlier Phenomenology over the later, more conservative Encyclopaedia Hegel as the super rationalist.Kojeve's lectures built Hegel's system on the 'master-slave' dialectic - the Lordship and Bondage section, where the desire that is directed towards another desire is necessarily the desire for recognition, which then engenders history, and moves it.
Kojeve renders as "master and slave" and as the interaction of dominant Self and subordinate Other.
Kojeve reads Lordship and Bondage as 'fight to the death for pure prestige,' for 'recognition' by 'the other'. The man who became master was willing to 'go all the way'. Yet although the master has the pleasure, he does not yet have the satisfaction of recognition by an equal: mastery is ultimately 'tragic' and 'an existential impasse'. It is the slave, who through work "negates given being" who overcomes the world: "the man who works transforms given being … where there is work there is necessarily change, progress, historical evolution".
Now this review of Bruce Baugh's French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism, gives us another indication of the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit. What is this Hegel? How does Baugh interpret the French reading of Hegel's Phenomenology that is different to Kojeve's?
Robert Bernasconi says that:
"Baugh's contention that unhappy consciousness and not the master-slave dialectic is the central reference point for French readers of Hegel is not to be understood as referring to those few pages at the end of the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit that describe what Hegel calls 'unhappy consciousness.' What Baugh has in mind under that title is that experience of a self divided against itself..."
A 'self divided against itself' captures the way surrealism relies on the unconscious forces ofdesire more than the conscious mind. A 'self divided against itself'makes a lot of sense of Klossowski and Bataille.The latter thinks of his life as an abortive condition or open wound as constituting a refutation of Hegel's closed system.
On this account the French reception of Hegel may be read as a succession of criticisms against the subject of desire; or the Hegelian conceit of a totalizing impulse which, for various reasons, has lost its plausibility. A close reading of the relevant chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit reveal that Hegel's text is less totalizing than presumed.