Reading Chapters 1 and 2 of NVC we come fully and squarely up against the peculiarity of Klossowski’s text. The discussion interprets and does so using a swathe of textual evidence but the interpretation is not a gentle teasing out of an argument, a kind of ‘efficient paraphrasing’, rather it is a positioned interpretation. That is, it offers a reading of Nietzsche that attempts to articulate a position with regards the body of Nietzsche’s work. That is to say, it both suggests a reading of Nietzsche that is a ’cause’ (ie; what Nietzsche says ‘comes first’ and our understanding is the effect of this) and it offers a reading of Nietzsche that makes Nietzsche an ‘effect’ of the reading (such that the reading ‘comes first’ and only through this reading do we come to understand Nietzsche). This curious ambiguity means that the reading is offering a ‘way of reading’. It is, as it were, intended to make us see Nietzsche’s work in a particular way. The danger, of course, is in distorting (’doing violence to’) the Nietzschean corpus. The question is, what are we to make of Klossowski’s reading? If we were to assess it simply on its textual accuracy, whether it is that ‘efficient paraphrase’ so beloved of secondary academic texts (Introductions to …) then we would miss the performative aspect of Klossowski’s reading, the way in which he wants to do something with the corpus and make it do something anew. Of course we have to allow that Klossowski has a desire to bring some truth to light rather than assume he is trying to mislead us or merely ‘read Nietzsche for his own purposes’ but to do so we have to acknowledge that in some way it is only through making Nietzsche into his own that Klossowski can reveal something interesting about Nietzsche. It is because of this peculiar reciprocity between Nietzsche’s corpus and Klossowski’s reading of it that we should perhaps speak of the ‘Klossowskian-Nietzschean’ (K-N) account offered in NVC rather than think of the book as merely an ‘interpretation’ of Nietzsche in the weak sense of paraphrase.
What is it that Klossowski pushes to the fore then? There is a distrust of thinking as a pure and moral capacity within Klossowski that he wishes to draw out of Nietzsche and pursue. This is grounded in a tension between the individual as thinker and the society of which they are a product. The terms Klossowski uses are the gregarious and the singular (NVC: 4) where the gregarious is the name given to the social aspect and the singular the name given to that which opposes or comes into conflict with the social. The social is above all formed in the context of language, or the ‘code of everyday signs’ and the tension can be understood as one between an immediacy located in the ’singularity that we are’ and a mediation of that singularity in the ‘code of everyday signs’. Roughly speaking we might think of this as a situation in which we are somehow trapped in language. Each time we try and think or express something, in particular each time we try and express our ‘depth’ (present the ‘true self that we are’, though this phrase is highly troublesome) we are betrayed by language.
This way of presenting things of course assumes that there is some way in which we are which can be betrayed. It would suggest, for example, that there is a real or true (we might say, following Heidegger, an ‘authentic’) self which we cover over and betray (fail to express) simply because any act of expression mediates the immediate. We might want to fall back on means of expression that aren’t linguistic and suggest that art, perhaps, is a means of authentic expression of the immediacy that is our depth precisely because it isn’t caught within the ‘code of everyday signs’. If we do this, however, we need to be careful to avoid an obvious problem - if we ‘read’ an artwork as expressing something more truthfully, and this ’something’ is taken to be a meaning, then for Klossowski-Nietzsche it looks like we will fall back into the code of everyday signs because the code of everyday signs is not simply language but meaning itself. Meaning is mediation and any search for meaning falls into the position of betraying our depth which is outside of any meaning. Klossowski-Nietzsche claim that “our depth is unexchangeable because it does not signify anything” (NVC: 31). Are we not left at a dead-end then? Can we simply not say or express anything since there is no meaning? This would amount to a form of quietism, of a giving up in the face of a nihilistic understanding of life and the social. This, i think, would be a mistake and a mis-reading of K-N because it would make it difficult to understand the ‘combat’ which it seems is central to the ethical drive of NVC.
The first chapter, in which we find the ‘Combat against Culture’, supposes that there is something of interest in the conflict between the unexchangeable depth of the singular and the gregarious leveling of the social. If the social is a form of indoctrination, an imposition of a morality that commonly makes thinking and the thinker / philosopher into little more than lie-makers that produce ways in which the social can reproduce itself to the detriment of the singular, then where does the impulse or force of the singular come form. Do we posit something like an original singularity to each ’subject’ which is then swallowed up in the social? Where did this singularity come from, what produced it? It would be a mistake, I believe, to attribute some ‘original subjectivity’ to K-N. Instead we will find the ‘depth’ described as chaos, as a flux or soup of impulses, a chaos that is formed into a singularity. The ‘formation’ of this singularity is what we need to investigate and what K-N will do so through the concept of ‘formations of sovereignty’ found later in NVC. Roughly speaking, the singular is nothing other than a formation of sovereignty in which one impulse (drive, force, instinct are all analogous concepts although not identical) triumphs over another. The “affects are enslaved by other affects - and not (at least not initially) by the affects of other individuals but by those within the same individual” (NVC: 10). It is not the social that ‘imposes’ itself on the singular but rather the singular that trains itself into becoming a ‘reasonable, rational and competent individual (member of society)’. We train ourselves to be slavish, we are not trained and imposed upon by some ‘oppressive’ force from outside. Consciousness triumphs over desire and we become reasonable people (NVC: 10).
(more on Ch 1 and 2 to come)
To call life itself just or unjust, to conceive life as samsara or suffering, is to judge life and to do so from outside life, from some position which is the ground of a judgement. To encounter life, respond to it, is inevitable and not all responses are equal, this much is inevitable. Too often, however, this encounter and response is thought of as a judgement. To not judge does not mean to not respond or that any response is as good as any other. There are different responses in life, different lives if you like - or different types of life. Life produces its own end, life drives itself to death but in the encounter with death there is another space of response, this time one that shows us the two fundamental ways of response, affirmation and negation, more life or never ending death.
How am I to think of life? The philosopher must ask this question. They must, moreover, continue to ask this question and to encounter the force of this question with responses – the philosopher must not simply ask an idle question but encounter the problem of the question, the problem the question arises from, responding with thought, with emotion, with passion, with action. Encounter and response constitute the activity of thought and living, though too often this dynamic to-and-fro is congealed, by the social, into regulated habits, pre-formed responses such as the response of the subject, ‘I think…’. Living is a poor name for the habits and habitats of the human. We are all, inevitably, products of the social, products of the inhuman and yet we are not inevitably condemned to remain nothing but product, commodity, object. It is not a matter of striving to become a subject since the subject is that which is subservient, the subject of the monarch. Rather it is a matter of striving for monarchy itself, becoming a crown within life but not a ruler, judge or controller. Crowned anarchy, this is the watchword, a monarch of creation, a singular moment that adds to the abundance of singular moments. In more traditional terms, this is the assumption of an imperative to autonomy, the self (auto) lawmaking (nomos) reality.
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So today I’m talking to the students in my existentialism class about the phenomenological moment, the encounter with the given which is presupposed in any account of how we encounter the world and which gives us back the world from a skeptical move which might try to doubt it or suggest it’s an illusion. As part of this I was saying that the world, the self, thinking are all primarily ‘just given’ and then we need to explore on top of that the how of the giving of the world, the self, thinking. This is to say, the world is, but how it is has still to be described. On the basis of this, of course, phenomenology offers us descriptions of this how the world is given, and can come up with some strange, some beautiful descriptions - and so here’s an example, the phenomenology of typewriters by Richard Polt. I’m not going to say anything directly about Polt’s essay in this post, maybe later, but this is for my existentialism and phenomenology students…
http://staff.xu.edu/~polt/typewriters/typology.html
This is an interesting article about the new upsurge in podcasted lectures. the Dreyfus lectures are really very interesting, though I have been listening more to his lectures on Heidegger than on Existentialism, perhaps because I am teaching existentialism so didn’t want to get too distracted…having said that, at least once in my own lectures I’ve commented on what Dreyfus was saying and directed my own students over there in order to get another take on the material.
Dreyfus lectures on Existentialism
Dreyfus lecture listings from Berkeley
The iPod lecture circuit - Los Angeles Times
In a recent post at Accursed Share, Joshua poses Levinas’ critique of Heidegger as rooted in the limitations of comprehension, even the extended notion of comprehension to be found in Heidegger’s work. His post is based on a reading of Levinas’ essay "Is ontology fundamental?" (Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings: pp1-32 - henceforth BPW). He is clear and concise is his account but, as needs must in a blog post, has to summarise and pose things quite starkly. This, I think, is a major benefit of ‘blog philosophy’, this need to summarise and contrast in a quick and somewhat schematic way, more akin to verbal exchanges than essay work since schema is intended to prompt comments and discussion rather than pretend at an over-arching knowledge. Such ’simplification’ enables the difference of one way of thinking to another to be posed sharply, though I often find myself doing something rather different in my own posts.
Heidegger and Levinas are counter-posed and to do so a fulcrum point is needed. For Joshua this fulcrum rests on the concept of knowledge, which Heidegger is still beholden to and which Levinas argues necessarily subsumes the individual and difference (particular) in the general and same (universal). For Levinas ontology cannot be fundamental since it is still a logy, a knowing, and the reality or truth or essence or soul of the individual - named as the Other with a big O in Levinas - is lost in any form of knowledge relation. Presumably we would want to say something like, either there is a relation with the Other and thus ontology is not fundamental or else all is lost. There is a relation with the Other in the encounter (not knowledge) with the face and thus ontology is not fundamental.
It is perhaps dangerous to be too assertive when giving an account of Kierkegaard. There’s a whole series of multiple meanings and possibly even the odd trap and foil for the unsuspecting, though less so than in Nietzsche. To think on from Kierkegaard, however, is to grant oneself a license to be wrong about what he said but still right in what is said. An exculpation, no doubt, but one that seems almost ‘truer’ to Kierkegaards’ thought than a slavishly accurate but effortless exegesis. Nonetheless this is an excuse even whilst it may be an exculpation.
It is with these caveats covering my back that I approach the ‘Preamble from the heart’ [Fear and Trembling: Penguin 2006, henceforth FT]. It is, to locate the exculpation within Kierkegaards’ own words, in an attempt to do some of the work so that I may get my bread with justice that this approach is made. The ‘Preamble’ is the introduction in the drama that is FT of the Knight of Resignation and the Knight of Faith within FT. We are to meet these key conceptual personae - as Deleuze would call them - as Kierkegaard attempts to conceptualise and think the problem of movement. It is how things move that is crucial to the Preamble, what it is that makes something a movement. To tighten this some, it is what makes a specific kind of movement exemplary or vital to the very notion of movement itself.
(questions in note form that are partly naive and part of my current work, questions as connections, as the objective reality of a thinking practice)
"Thus Marx, rather than Kierkegaard or Hegel, is right, since he asserts with Kierkegaard the specificity of human existence and, along with Hegel, takes the concrete man in his objective reality." (Sartre, The search for a method)
Jaspers thinks that "We are taught to catch a presentiment of the transcendent in our failures; it is their profound meaning." The death of god is the failure that reveals the transcendent (negative theology). What’s the difference between this and Critchley’s ‘achievement of a certain meaninglessness’ that he outlines at the beginning of his little book on death? Is it that to succeed is to already be beyond ourselves? Failure - is this the encounter with the problematic in Deleuze? Is what we are involved in when we are forced to think by the problem the lack of ease with which we navigate and move through the world (the ease of living)? This might appear so but this would defy the constant injunction by Deleuze against lack as a grounding or primary force.
I’ve been off ill for a couple of weeks, bad enough to have to cancel last weeks set of lectures (apologies to students but unavoidable I’m afraid), though during that time there was of course the usual ongoing work which I’m now catching up on. Amongst the things that need doing is passing on news of the new Kierkegaard Philosophy Carnival which should be of interest for my ‘existentialism and phenomenology’ (EP) students. I have a post in the carnival, one where I discuss ‘the work of faith’ - something I focussed on in one of my lectures and which I find quite a fascinating theme within Kierkegaards’ existential.
… in the Guardian online, over here.
“Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a 30,000 page menu and no food.”
Pirsig is an interesting character. I’ve read both the motorbike and the boat book and confess to thinking of him as a bit of a new age character, even though one that derives from Western philosophy. It’s a while since I’ve looked at his work and I suppose I’m not surprised that he’s disapointed with his reception by western philosophy, but then Pirsig always seemed to be a little like one of those philosophers who doesn’t read philosophers, at least not contemporary ones, and who therefore produce interesting ideas but in such a way that they can’t really plug them into any actual debate amongst philosophers. Of course this isn’t to denigrate Pirsigs’ work at all, merely to suggest that philosophical debate requires the philosopher to engage in that dialogue, to respond to other philosophers around them as well as to Plato and the classics. Having said that, Wittgenstein was famous for having read very little philosophy and perhaps was just more lucky in being taken under the wing of an active academic (Russell) who could offer him some shelter inside the academy, something that never happened to Pirsig apparently. Pirsig’s story also has a certain frisson of tragedy, personal and intellectual, that almost requires that he feel somehow disappointed in his success. Personally I’d rather be in his position, I think - able to publish my ideas in my own way and be successful with them, rather than any ‘academic’ success (whatever that is exactly - well, essentially the sort of sucecss to which one can respond, ‘it’s academic though’ and mean, ‘it’s not really important’, not really ‘engaged in life’). Still, the grass is always greener…
