The subject includes an intimacy with invisibility

SEEING THE INVISIBLE

In 1971 Marguerite Duras met Francis Bacon in Paris. They spoke about painting and writing. It was a matter of the experience of accident shared by writing and painting. Bacon said, "I do not draw. I begin by placing a lot of spots (taches). I wait for what I call the 'accident', the patch from which the painting emanates. The patch is the accident. However, if you stick to the accident, if you believe that you understand the accident, you will once again make an illustration, because the patch always resembles something. You cannot understand the accident. If you could understand it, then you would also understand the way you act and proceed. But the way of acting or proceeding is unforeseen (l’imprévu); you will never be able to understand it".

The definition which Bacon provides of the way a painter proceeds is the following: to paint means to integrate the accident (accident, hazard, chance) into the movement of painting, without subjecting oneself to it. To paint means to stand up to the accident (the catastrophe), to give it a chance by responding to it with a technique which neither allows it to triumph nor restricts nor neutralizes it. Bacon calls the technique, imagination technique. It is his means for making the accidental chaos precise. The imagination technique unifies two contrary efforts. It resists and it affirms. It affirms the accident of chaos by resisting it. It gives form to formlessness.

There is no subject that does not touch formlessness, the abyss of its possibilities, the boundaries of consciousness, the limits of reason. The subject's self-experience is the experience of these limits and these chaotic depths, the experience of collapsing orientation, of memory caving in, an experience of blindness, frenzy, and turbulence. The subject touching chaos goes through a blinding that is not ameliorated by anything. It traverses the night of its ontological blindness. Its eye, if this singular makes sense for a second, this transcendental organ of the singular experience of world and experience, is flooded and blinded by the excess of the visible, by the "blinding extent of what is to be seen".

Seeing can do nothing else but become blind. It has been placed in an absolute darkness: blind seeing blinded by visibility or seeing of nothingness or of emptiness, seeing that lowers its eyelids in order to see, that closes its eyes in order to see more than it sees with 'eyes open'. It is this other seeing with closed eyes which Duras has repeatedly defended. "She sees," it is said of the woman in the film, The Truck, "as soon as she closes her eyes. What is unbearable about the world she sees even more strongly when she closes her eyes. [...] she closes her eyes. Behind her eyelids she sees something. [...] the end of the world." By denying herself visibilities, the ocular evidence, she opens herself to the space of the invisible, the sphere "where one is dumb and blind". "I try," says Duras, "to see as much as possible there". As much as possible in the space of blindness which is the space of absence itself, of absence and emptiness, which leaves the subject itself empty and absent, indeterminate, without properties, indifferent.

There is no art which could close itself off to the experience of this indifference. There is no art which could not be catastrophic, because the subject can only be affirmed as a catastrophic subject, as a subject of desubjectivization, of the turn-around, the turning point, of contro-versy or the turn, as aggression turned against itself. As long as the subject remains turned toward emptiness, the abyss, nothingness or the exterior, it is the subject of catastrophe. As soon as it begins to affirm itself as a catastrophic subject, it opens the dimension, if not of happiness, then at least of cheerfulness, of joyful self-affirmation and beatitudo. Instead of drawing its catastrophic identity from the tragic paradigm of unhappy consciousness, self-affirmation as catastrophe transports the subject into a state of universal cheerfulness which could also be called happiness. Happiness or cheerfulness. in any case, it is a matter of a free relationship of the subject to its unfreedom, of a commanding way of dealing with everything which seems to have robbed it of its autonomy from the very start.

The full subject is the subject of this intensified freedom and autonomy. It knows about the limitedness of its knowledge and it knows that this limitedness is what first makes knowledge possible because its objective unfreedom in the space of facts is the condition of possibility of absolute freedom and of a real overflying of the self. This freedom is not absolute because it is limitless. It is absolute because it puts itself into an easy relationship with unfreedom. The subject is the subject of this easiness which allows it to experience its life in its unliveability. This life includes it's being unleashed into the absolute, into an absolute which is another name for what is impossible and untouchable and unliveable and unpossessable and without reference.

That is the sense of its primordial unbounding. There is experience only as the experience of the limits, as the destabilization of the subject of experiencing the absolute, the impossible, the untouchable, the unliveable, the unpossessable and the non-referential. To "go through an experience," says Heidegger, "means that it happens to us, that it hits us, comes over us, throws us over and transforms us. To speak of 'going through' in this turn of phrase means precisely that we do not bring about the experience through ourselves; to go through here means to suffer through something, to receive that which hits us insofar as we bow to it". To receive what is necessary is the condition of possibility for putting it into question and rejecting it. Heidegger's concept of experience aims at this excessive reception as an expression of being in agreement with what cannot be changed. In Lacanian terms: beyond cynicism, there is the confrontation with (constituted) reality, the experience of the real. This experience demands its hyperbolic affirmation or signature which drives the subject to its limits. Perhaps this is the definition of philosophy which all philosophers share: philosophy is the experience of the unavoidable and its affirmation.

The question concerning the subject (What is a subject?) The question concerning art, the question concerning writing, the question concerning philosophy (What is art? What is writing? What is philosophy?) must open itself to the question of blindness. It is as if there were a subject or as if there were art, writing, philosophy or only as this experience. It is clear that the subject is blind. It does not see without not seeing, without being blind in relation to the visible which keeps contact with the invisible. Seeing is seeing of the invisible; what is seen only marks the boundaries of an enveloping invisibility which coincides with the (itself invisible) visibility of the visible. The subject includes an intimacy with invisibility which, as the abyssal ground of the visible, remains the necessarily missed target of its seeing. The question concerning the subject implies the question concerning its place in the order of the visible, concerning its position in the domain of constituted reality.

Obviously, the subject is placed up against the wall of the invisible. It sees without seeing. By supposing that it sees, it brings forth an entire world of the invisible. Like its act of existing, the movements of writing and painting are catastrophic. They owe their continuity to the discontinuity of encounters with the incommensurable, which is the space of the subjectís ontological blindness. At the edges of this space, the subject seeks a language without being able to appropriate it, without being its owner. Instead of being the owner of its language, the subject is taken into possession by the catastrophic movement of writing, by a language. "What happens when you write without seeing anything?" asks Derrida at one point. There is no writing that is unrelated to the invisible. One cannot write without blindness or: one writes necessarily "with eyes closed".

Just as the painter has to "live through a moment in which he doesn't see anything, through a collapse of visual coordinates," the subject has to rely on its blindness by writing. To write means to give space to the catastrophe through language. Writing is connected with painting through this catastrophic experience to which the subject tries to give adequate words and form. It is a matter of approaching the catastrophe, the collapsing horizon without giving oneself up to it, without being torn apart by chaos, without pathetically sacrificing oneself to it. The responsibility of art in relation to chaos is decided here: does the subject have the courage and the willingness to affirm itself as a subject touching chaos in dizzying blindness? Does the subject have the strength and endurance to aver its impotence in view of the catastrophe.

Does the subject have the will and energy to erect itself in a situation of collapse of its world, i.e. in a situation of complete loneliness which throws it back onto its ontological desolation, thus infinitely singularizing it? "There is no painter," Deleuze repeats, "who did not go through this experience of chaos [...] where he no longer sees anything and threatens to go under, collapse of the visual coordinates". Collapse of lived reality, collapse of the familiar universe which is our world, reality as a shared communicative connection of world of facts, the order of well-known things and visibilities, phenomenal dimension. Armed with its blindness, the catastrophic subject, the subject of writing, the subject of painting, penetrates the domain of phenomena to respond to its fundamental inconsistency and emptiness. The visible hovers over the abyss of the invisible toward which the act of painting flies while lifting, piercing, tearing the phenomenal veil, the fabric of visibilities.

The catastrophe does not devour everything. If it is true that painting is the "painting of catastrophe", as Deleuze asserts, that in art or in philosophy, in writing, in science it is a matter of embracing chaos, of integrating it into one's own arrangement, then it becomes indispensable to emphasize that the embracing of chaos, which is anything but an enclosing, implies a twofold demand: 1) "the inevitable catastrophe must not wash everything away"; 2) it must always be a matter of "escaping the catastrophe". Painting does not open itself to the experience of catastrophic blinding in order to sacrifice itself to the catastrophe. It opens itself in order to escape it by retaining within itself an enhanced seeing which I want to call seeing the invisible.

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distruggere per purificare o anche solo ricostruire

ph salvia selvatica, Angelo di calderina




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Distruggere e dimenticare? Deleuze non ha praticamente mai parlato di Nabokov, e ancor meno di Ada o Ardore, il suo capolavoro assoluto, che racconta gli amori proibiti e perfettamente consumati dell’irresistibile, meravigliosa, sensuale, leggera, «supererudita», pigra, languida, campionessa di Scarabeo e di farfalle, eternamente fedele, sempiternamente infedele Ada, e di suo cugino e fratellastro Van, quasi altrettanto seducente e volteggiante benché in qualche caso più oppresso dai vecchi valori dello spirito di serietà (onore, virilità, gelosia). È un fatto strano, la cui stranezza resiste a ogni giustificazione empirica volgare (Deleuze ne avrebbe ignorato l’esistenza, o non l’avrebbe letto, o l’avrebbe letto troppo in fretta ecc.). E questa stranezza dipende dal profondo richiamo alla filosofia di Deleuze della parola d’ordine di Ada, detta a nessuno in particolare da una ragazzina di dodici anni, a piedi nudi, mentre sfoglia un vecchio erbario della madre ritrovato per caso in un vecchio baule, e che dà una delle chiavi essenziali dell’opera: «distruggere e dimenticare». Bisogna distruggere perché bisogna che la bellezza e gli amori muoiano, per rinascere altrove, più tardi e a volte addirittura, quando la vita è ben fatta, nelle stesse condizioni. E bisogna dimenticare perché non c’è vita nella memoria che si ripeta sempre uguale, perché bisogna andare di continuo al di là, attraversare, passare oltre per vivere ancora.
Tuttavia, il genio di Nabokov sta nel precisare la sua parola d’ordine in questo modo. A Van che le propone di sotterrare o di bruciare il più presto possibile quell’erbario feticcio del passato – «immediatamente» dice lui – Ada risponde: «D’accordo. Distruggere e dimenticare. Ma abbiamo ancora un’ora prima del tè». Non lo si potrebbe dire meglio; ecco lo splendore delle esperienze passate: in nome della vita presente, bisogna distruggerle e dimenticarle, ma prendendosi il proprio tempo e cogliendo in modo chiaro il carattere irrisorio delle esigenze di oblio del presente.

La vita vera è in questa sospensione del tempo, non nella sua abolizione né, al contrario, nell’esaurimento del suo senso estatico o profetico. E le vie che autorizzano tale sospensione sono qui meravigliosamente esplicitate: sono quelle dell’umorismo, della leggerezza, dell’impertinenza e dei discorsi senza capo né coda. Non ne esistono altre...

(Le Libéralisme est-il une sauvagerie? Bayard, Montrouge 2007 forse? o da qualche parte)

via Dal Bon

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ri-posto; Nabòkov de'preferi; ringraz. e rimembro me a 10 anni richiesta dai genitori impegnati a fare ordine, che facciamo dei tuoi disegni di quando "eri piccola" (sic, sigh) ? - Al fuoco i ricordi! Invece tenni religiosamente e segreti quelli della mia bambina.

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Without magic reality is just an illusion.

ph salsel: normallemmon



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Superanimal

1 There exists a structural homology between the outside (dehors), of which Maurice Blanchot speaks — an outside that is inside instead of merely being outward—and with him Michel Foucault in "La pensée du dehors" (1966) and Gilles Deleuze for example in "Critique et Clinique" (1993) and that what by Jacques Lacan is called the Real, which persists amidst the (homogeneous, pseudo-consistent) reality.

2 The persistence of the real, the outside or the chaos and Dionysian non-ground (in the thinking of Nietzsche and Deleuze & Guattari) is not only a fundamental problem in contemporary philosophy.

3 There is no thinking that is not touched by this exterior — touched and initiated, animated and seduced, activated and made insecure — so that it must admit to its inconsistency, an admission that one can simply call thinking because thinking about thinking belongs to thinking; the self-mediation with its constitutive impotence and contingency.

4 That is why I am interested in the role of animals and children, the untamed element, in the philosophical and literary text (we presume what cannot be presumed, namely that we can differentiate between the two).

5 I think — but these are only examples — about Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Derrida.

6 In the first section of "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (1873), Nietzsche writes: “What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibbers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?”

7 The human subject rest on the fleeing back of a tiger; it hardly knows that this is the case because it is so tightly wound up in its illusion of autonomy — the notion of being the self-conscious agent of his acts and judgements.

8 That is his elementary narcissism that is supposed to protect him from elementary forces by confining him in a cage of consciousness that makes him believe there is no beyond of consciousness, at least no beyond of self-consciousness, no exterior of this ideology based on this interiority phantasm.

9 Wittgenstein’ thinking is also populated by myriad animals.

10 What is the function of the animal in the Wittgensteinian text?

11 What do the animals of animality stand for?

12. Why does Wittgenstein say in a central passage of "Culture and Value", that “within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed”?

13. Why does his discourse, here and elsewhere, evoke the image of untamed nature?

14 Because the discourse, to use this word that was alien to him, must come into direct contact with its inherent alienness to the extent that language game and life form are in fact constructs or levels of consistency arbitrarily spanned over the abyss of inconsistency.

15 And even Derrida affirms the role of the untamed in the act of reading, writing and thinking in an interview on his book "Glas" (1974) in which imagines himself on the back of a wild horse, which Kafka and Wittgenstein incidentally do as well: “‘I’m afraid”: this is never me exactly, nor is the fear mine exactly ... Fear because the horse I am straddling – the text – the textual force on which I am mounted must be stronger than me, must not let itself be dominated, broken, or mastered by the bit that it has or that I put or that I take in its mouth. Otherwise, it’s not interesting.”

16 Not interesting: boring, beyond every possible experience, thus beyond an experiri that leads the subject beyond himself into the unknown.

17 Is it possible to imagine art and philosophy without the carefreeness of children and the wildness of the zone called nature and its boisterous inhabitants, which we call animals?

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Ingeborg Bachmanns Traumnotate der Jahre 1962-1966 kreisen um die Frage der Teilbarkeit von Schmerz. Es geht ums Teilen durchs Mitteilen und um dessen Unmöglichkeit. Alle Schwierigkeiten des Schreibens konzentrieren sich hier. Vielleicht ist der Schmerz das Unteilbare. Er reißt das Subjekt aus der Gemeinschaft der Schmerzlosen, wirkt isolatorisch, zerreißt. Bachmann glaubt auf einer Insel zu sein inmitten Angst einflößender Indifferenz. Unverzichtbar ist die Insistenz, vom Schmerz Zeugnis abzulegen. Er verlangt nach einer ihm adäquaten Sprache. Wir wissen von Artaud, wie inadäquat ihm jeder Satz angesichts des Schmerzes vorkam. Er rettete sich in den Schrei. Bachmann sucht die leisere Form. Im Traum empfindet sie sich als „verzweifelt allein“. Der Schmerz individuiert das Subjekt, treibt es ins Abseits, schleift es an den Rand. Weil er sprachlos macht, verlangt er nach Sprache. Bachmann ist sich dessen bewusst. Sie taumelt, halb wach, halb schlafend, am Abgrund ihrer Existenz. Hier wird die Notwendigkeit zu schreiben zum Existenzgrund. Zu schreiben oder zu sprechen: Jedenfalls geht es um Mitteilung, Zeugnis, Artikulation. Wen die Stummheit erfasst, den ergreift der Hunger nach Sprache. Bachmanns Poetologie ist eine der Auflehnung. Im Schmerz rührt sie an eine unüberwindbare Grenze. Das Unmögliche blitzt auf. Im Herzen der Sprache insistiert ein Schweigen, das an eine noch unbekannte Sprache appelliert. Der Schmerz ruft nach ihr, indem er die bekannte entkräftet. Bachmann erfährt ihn als Gefährdung ihres Selbst, seiner Konsistenz und Vertrautheit. Die „Angstneurose“ stellt vors Nichts, indem sie es zum Gegenstand der Selbsterfahrung macht. Was könnte schmerzhafter sein als ein Selbst, das sich als Platzhalter des Nichts begreift? Der Kopf droht zu platzen: „durch den Körper gehen dauernd Wellen von Erregung, an den Händen geht mir die Haut ab von den letzten nervösen Bläschen, die ich in den vorigen Wochen plötzlich stundenweis bekommen habe.“ Vorm Schmerz schützt auch der Traum nicht. Das Nichts ist überall. Er zieht seine Protagonistin ins Abseits der Sprache, in einen Bereich gesteigerter Unheimlichkeit. Dort wuchern weitere Träume. In einem Gewirr an Schichtungen häuft sich Traum auf Traum. Man meint in einer Wüste zu sein, deren Hitze einem den Atem nimmt. Es ist zum Durchdrehen, doch handelt es sich um ein Durchdrehen mit großer Genauigkeit: „Wenn der Traum anfängt, weiß ich schon, daß ich verrückt bin. Die Welt ist nicht mehr die Welt. Es sind noch Elemente von ihr da, alle Details, aber in einer Zusammensetzung, die irre ist. Alles ist farbig, Autos rollen heran, Menschen tauchen auf, stark überfärbt, grinsen im letzten Augenblick, wenn ich an sie herankomme, fallen um, sind Strohpuppen, alles hat trotzdem eine unglaubliche Konsequenz, die Bilder, die Farben, die Gegenstände, mein Herumgehen in dieser Welt, ich gehe immerzu weiter, manchmal ist es schrecklich, dann nicht so sehr, und immerzu, während ich an diese Gegenstände und Personen komme, weiß ich, dass ich verrückt bin, und wenn es mich ängstigt, dann versuche ich, die Augen zuzumachen, ich will heraus aus dieser Welt, ich will unbedingt heraus.“

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Stupidity is a structure

Stupidity is a structure of thought as such: it is not a way of wrong, it expresses in law the nonsense in thought. Stupidity is not a mistake, but a tissue of error. We know stupid thoughts, stupid speeches that are made whole of truths; but these truths are low, are those of a low, heavy and lead soul. Stupidity and, more deeply, what she is the symptom: a low way of thinking. [...] when someone asks what philosophy is for, the answer must be aggressive, since the question is ironic and biting. [...] it serves to harm stupidity, it makes stupidity something shameful.

Nietzsche and philosophy, 

University press of France, Paris, 1962

ph La Manta, Saluzzo
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ovvero