Side Effects

Thinking when Standing

2009-06-11T14:20:00.007Z

Alongside solitude, Nietzsche’s remark that “I am one thing, my writings are another” also materialises in the human body of the philosopher. A startling fact: the body language of certain academic philosophers remains unaffected by their thoughts! Think of the academic who commands an unyielding and static presence to the thoughts they articulate. The appearance is not a question of an absence of “emotion” or even a question of timidity. Rather, what appear is a literal embodiment of the body as the “one thing” and the thought as “another.”

(Max Klinger, "The Philosopher")

What is the phenomenology of this relation between thinking and the body? The question wouldn’t have much urgency to it, were it not for the content of philosophy itself. My own reason for dimming the lights and opening the windows during teaching is because sustained, engaged thinking literally gives me a vertiginous headache. Once in a while, I must pace the room and inhale some cold air. But the pain is not because of the arduousness of teaching itself, but because if we are to seriously contend with the possibility that the world we come into contact with is altered by our very perception and touch with it, then our body must take full responsibility for being on the frontline of this crevice.

“The world is my representation.” Schopenhauer’s thought alone demands the body take heed. In doing so, the body is obligated to express the level of this thought through its failure to “hold sway,” to cite Husserl. Does thinking becoming desensitized to the corporeal weight of idealism and thus remove all evidence of its presence from the human body? If not, then holding out into the nothingness of “endless space” must constitute some kind of threat to pre-reflective embodiment. Schopenhauer agrees: “For a being who thinks, it is a precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space.” Standing and thinking: a tense combination, which Schopenhauer, with his acute sensitivity to transience and the mutability of matter, gave full reign to by making the body the centre of the universe—paradoxically a universal body to be denied.

(Giorgio de Chirico, "The Conquest of the Philosopher")

But there is one final question: how did it occur that standing and thinking failed to gain the dignity that walking and thinking have? And here, we can think of the tradition of the Stoa and the Stoics. The relation between the Stoa as a place and the Stoics as historical philosophers is, of course, far from arbitrary. The philosophy of Stoicism, practised in the public arena of the Stoa, is inextricably bound with the act of walking. And indeed Greek philosophy more broadly is surrounded by the halo of thinkers who walk. Yet this motion remains incomplete without attending to the gesture of standing after walking.

It seems to me that the cessation of movement—both physical and mental—is a privileged moment, in which the felt experience of thought comes to the surface. I would claim that cognition catches sight of the demand placed on the body, which was otherwise dormant during the time of walking. A vision unfolds: Countering the great tradition of thinkers who walk, there thus marches a legacy of thinkers who cling to the walls when struck by the lens of thought, neurotically ensuring their body remains intact despite the vulnerability of the empirical world around them. But the legacy is a precarious one, since standing soon gives way to a febrile state, which can be identified as "sitting." Here, something profound and unnerving occurs: the being whom, according to Schopenhauer, “throng, press, and toil, restless and rapidly arising and passing away in beginningless and endless time,” is no longer redeemed by walls and doors, and must gather his thoughts from down below. Yet the sitting is an admission to an end, a rupture in continuity and self-poise, which standing up will never regain. The body is marked by its refusal to stand and think in one place. Once more, I must make recourse to my “anti-hero” Gustav von Aschenbach who embodies the genesis of this end perfectly:

Thinking in Solitude

2009-06-11T11:09:00.004Z

“I am one thing,” writes Nietzsche, “my writings are another.” I have never fully understood this claim. Are we led to believe that Nietzsche the man is even more “dynamite” than his writings, or, is the man a more “humane” counterpart to the dynamite? Either way, this apparent divorce between the “one thing” of the self and the otherness of writing is somehow peculiar to philosophy. Quite unlike any other, philosophy is a form of writing that engenders itself toward a special form of awkwardness. This is the awkwardness of philosophy itself: of the grand gesture to turn inwards (Heraclitus: “I searched my nature”), breaking down all that culture and life has imposed upon the pre-reflective self, only to produce concepts with nothing more than a contingent relation to the everyday world. The lack of material evidence in philosophy remains a vulgar problem: consequentially, philosophy is a highly self-conscious discipline (see this discussion of Heidegger by way of an example).

“I am one thing, my writings are another.” Yes, it is for this reason of awkwardness with regard to oneself, that the association between thought and solitude has such a deeply engrained bond. The Kantian “nobility” of human thought (and more so aesthetic experience) is predicated on the idea of the subject cultivating a detachment from his own self (And solitude is invariably the domain of "his" solitude). The same could also be said of Husserl – both thinkers invent a mode of solitude, in which access to the external world is at the assent of the lone subject. And yet Kant was social, “he liked a drink”. Immersion in the world of social affairs did not undermine the unity of his thought, at least not until the very end. Schopenhauer’s solitude becomes more problematic, however. Accusations that he is one thing, but his writings are another become ammunition for those who think that writing and self ought to be formless, and that without this passage, conceptual uncertainty follows.

I am one thing with my writings. That would be the call of solitude, the impervious shield constructed to ward off all imposters. Graham Harman, in one of his insightful advice posts, points that the solitude of the graduate student in his 20s becomes undignified by his mid-30s, he writes: “There are many self-defeating alternatives, one of which was recently mocked by a very intelligent friend as “the idea of great, heroic, conceptual labor which can only be undertaken by rugged males in conditions of terrible solitude.” Yeah, I remember that phase too, at about age 25. It’s respectable then, but becomes ridiculous and self-defeating if you’re still there at 35.” Irrespective of whether or not this is true —and I suspect it is true —what is interesting is the idea of a temporal threshold, in which solitude suddenly becomes unacceptable, and all such “morbid” tendencies overcome. Does such a point demarcate the transformation of philosophical awkwardness to philosophical legitimacy?

As an endnote, Paul Auster writing on the death of his father: “Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing.” Auster stands before a man shrouded in solitude and his thought is stopped in its tracks: the solitude has taken flight in Auster’s refusal to write. But here Auster gives us a clue: the father is a man of solitude, but it is a solitude not borne of a need to produce – as it is so often cited in the philosophical hero – but present as a force which resists all temporal thresholds: “Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not have to see himself being seen by anyone else.”

The Perceiving Body

2009-06-03T21:12:00.002Z

Dermot Moran has a nice piece on Merleau-Ponty and seeing here, followed up as nicely by the ever perceptive Fido the Yak. Moran’s piece offers a nice summary of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of ocularcentrism in philosophy. As Moran states, “Seeing can touch: it touches the texture of things. We literally see roughness and smoothness, for example, the coarse texture of the carpet.” We can think here of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to aesthetics as demonstration of this claim, as he puts it in his article on Cezanne: “These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception. It is only as a result of a science of the human body that we finally learn to distinguish between our senses….We see the depth, the smoothness, softness, the hardness of objects; Cezanne even claimed that we see the odor.”

Mikel Dufrenne, whose The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is first on my “summer reading list,” is also important here. I have jumped to his discussion of presence and perception. Dufrenne’s line of thought is more or less consistent with Merleau-Ponty: the body’s intentionality is prior to cognition, records the phenomenon of the world, and is capable of perceptive knowledge, thanks to the interplay between the corporeal cogito and the reflective cogito. But Dufrenne is especially good on describing the primacy of the body during aesthetic experience, as he writes: “The aesthetic object is above all the apotheosis of the sensuous….Thus the aesthetic object first manifests itself to the body, immediately inviting the body to join forces with it. Instead of the body’s having to adapt itself to the object in order to know it, it is the object which anticipates, in order to satisfy, the demands of the body” (339). This is truly the act of the body stretching out into the world, asserting itself as the basis of all experience.

To prove this claim, Dufrenne speaks of the embodiment of the artist, offering a brilliant analysis of the phrase “thinking with one’s hands” (see also Elizabeth A. Behnke’s equally excellent article “At the Service of the Sonata”). Dufrenne has us think of the artist’s relation to creativity, the free flowing spontaneity which is possible thanks to the invisible border between creation and the physiology of the hand, writing that: “Each inflection of the melody awakens an echo in his body, as do the subtleties of harmony which means as much for the hand as for the ear. He hears with his fingers” (341, my bold). “He hears with his fingers” – what a truly marvellous image!

The contribution from Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne is especially striking, given the Kantian (and Schopenhauerean) backdrop which privileges cognition over the sensuous realm. Consider Schopenhauer on sight in “certain larvae, worms, and zoophytes” (W2, 84). He writes: “Animals without eyes know only by touch what is immediately present to them in space.” The idea here is one of substitution: the deficiency of blindness limits spatial depth to the scope of touch, thus instigating touch as the primary sense - a manifestly dubious claim.

How is the tension between sight and touch played out during “aesthetic experience?” Is aesthetic experience the mode of affective experience, whereby cognition is divested of its materiality? Is the materiality of the body an encumbrance to the “pure subject of knowing,” to cite Schopenhauer? What then of “losing” oneself in the artwork? Do the eyes perceive independently of the body?

Yet as the Moran article shows, sight is not synonymous with vision. And here Merleau-Ponty shines through directing thought “downward” – a direction at odds with traditional accounts of aesthetic experience. But this is no simple replacement of cognition with the body: Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological aesthetics attests to the “bodily teleology” latent in all appearances. Latency is an important idea. Turning back to Schopenhauer: if we take the aesthetic subject in Schopenhauer as devoid of individuality and thus “elevated” to the “eternal world-eye,” then where does the body dwell if not in a site of disappearance, thus affecting an aesthetics of disembodiment? Yet the body does persist and is returning to, though no doubt in a different mode of being. Soon after, Schopenhauer makes an odd admission: the peacefulness of the nervous system – secured by, among other things, “a peaceful night’s sleep” – alters the susceptibility toward aesthetic pleasure. Does the latency of those embodied conditions manifest themselves as aesthetic experience? That would be a question which focuses on how the passages, anxieties, and reveries of the body become constitutive of the very experience of having transcended the body.

From the Window

2009-05-25T17:53:00.002Z

The lustre of melancholy. Perhaps that same lustre will one day reduce all places to a dim luminosity on the horizon. All places directed toward the same tragic end, broken from their site, and subordinated to an amorphous mass. In the meantime, the days are getting longer. But so too is the grey sky, which has been dispatched to drop humid rain over the balcony. Tonight, the window is open and the fire escape is visible. The tip of a coffee machine my brother bought me in 2006 is poking out, its dereliction a result of my caffeine intolerance. From down below, the smell of burnt sugar and oats is coming in. My head is positioned outside of the window and the rain is collecting in an empty glass Pepsi bottle. But there is no food here, only unopened tins of inedible materiality.

The End of Days? No, just the end of this day –this month –this table. “Soon there will be nothing where there never was anything.” But the substance of a life endures. With it, a disarming asymmetry runs parallel: my body yearns to be a site of inhabitation, but the inhabitation transcends the limits of my body, positioning itself in an underground region prior to all awareness. Alas, the indifference of all human places passes through us, oblivious to the sediment we deposit in the walls and doors. Unaffected by the outburst of human emotion, the world of things and memories remains static, poised in its global coldness. But no cosmic void can subdue the human craving for stone, cotton, and wood to reciprocate our affections. The chair that becomes an extension of my being; the balcony that becomes my thinking ground; the window that becomes a glance inwards—all follies in the wasteland of desire and memory.

The Weird and Alien

2009-05-23T12:53:00.004Z

My paper, “The Weird and Alien: an Introduction to Phenomenology,” given at the Sussex Undergraduate Philosophy Society last week, is available to hear here. The overriding theme is something I’ve been thinking through on this blog: phenomenology’s relationship to strangeness and estrangement. I still don’t quite feel as though I’ve got to the core of this matter. All this paper affords is an overview of phenomenology’s privileged role in dislodging habit and sedimented values. My inclusion of Lovecraft points at directions this theme could go in. But the more fruitful direction will likely be mined through working through Husserl’s idea of the alien as “accessibility in genuine inaccessibility, in the mode of incomprehensibility.” Alongside the Husserl, xenoarchaeological work will be required to demonstrate the transformation of the Earth from homeworld to alienworld.

The talk is also interesting for me to hear back, as I was in the midst of a migraine while giving it. Consequently, hearing it back is itself a process of weirdness, as my sense of self-presence was far from intact during the talk. Alongside my usual habit of turning off the halogen lights when either teaching or giving a paper, I have recently got into the habit of opening the windows as far as possible and adjusting the blinds. Alas, on this late afternoon on the Sussex campus, the sun was shining violently and there was no chance of hastening the heat-death of the universe.

The Anonymous Flesh

2009-05-07T13:31:00.004Z

Once more, I am fumbling in the darkness of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh. I cannot explain why this notion continues to haunt and hound me other than through some intuitive sense of its searing profundity. My questions are mounting: how does the flesh undercut the division between my body and yours? More broadly: how can we commit to a phenomenology of the flesh without subjecting that element to the “look” of the subject? Phrased still a different way: how do we retain the primacy of the body without already seeing things in their “place”? Indeed, can the flesh even be “seen”?

The immediate response is to turn to Merleau-Ponty’s much cited example of the reversibility of touching, whereupon “my body touched and my body touching [means] there is overlapping or encroachment” (p. 143). And so my body opens itself to profound ambiguity. Although I, as bodily subject, am able to both touch and be touched, never are the two coincidental with one another. Never does the touched and touching hand come together as a unitary phenomenon. Rather, some-thing unfolds in that crevice, a difference that underscores all identity. The difference, it turns out, is not an alienating force, but an expression of the corporeal world that is unmasked when different bodies fold into one another, as Merleau-Ponty puts it: “…[identity and difference] bring to birth a ray of natural light that illuminates all flesh and not only my own” (p. 142).

“Illuminates all flesh.” How can this be possible? Merleau-Ponty also asks: “Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh”? (p. 138). A few years ago, I had thought of the flesh as an adhesive element. I cannot be sure I was right. Does the flesh bind materiality? Yet the flesh is not matter. No, the flesh is an element that precedes matter. Does the flesh materialises as matter? No, the flesh is “thinkable by itself” (p. 140).

We return: “Illuminates all flesh.” We must remember that in some deep sense the unfolding/enveloping/illuminating of flesh breaks the “fundamental narcissism of all vision” (p. 139). Seen in this way, the agency that (re)appears the midst of the egocentric perception of the world is not some refined transcendental ego that survives the phenomenological epoché. Rather, what is unmasked is an “anonymous visibility [that] inhabits both of us, a vision in general” (p. 142). Here, I think we touch on a clue. The anonymity of the flesh is not an eye without a perspective but an element alien to cognition—precisely because it resists abstraction but has already planted itself in the human body. The flesh is already with us. But with us in an impersonal way. The flesh, after all, is not reducible to corporeality. No, in an exemplary way, the body reflects and vibrates the flesh in its contours, ecstasies, and ruptures.

Phenomenologically, how is this claim demonstrable? How, that is, do we experience the trees as watching us, except as the evocation of a strange memory? The answer is to resist humanising the flesh – to countenance a flesh without sight and sound. The anonymous flesh: the flesh before the division of subject and object, which is forever on the verge of coming to the foreground, and yet always retains a distance from the surface.

The Anonymous Earth

2009-04-21T14:30:00.009Z

Phenomenology, it has been empirically proven, has a special relation to the unmasking the strange underbelly of everyday life. Above all, “It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness” (Merleau-Ponty, 2006, p. 66). Easy to overlook the titanic power of this gesture. Yet a question can be posed in the face of this strangeness: If phenomenology assists in us rediscovering the things of the world in their phenomenological givenness, then where does this place the phenomenologist? The speculative answer would be: as the alien visitor to Earth, describing the appearance of things without yet prescribing their cause or effect. One way in which phenomenology does this is by decentering the centrality of humans at the heart of the world, and by encouraging us to attend to the radical wilderness underlying all modes of givenness and self-presentation.

This mention of a de-centred human experience may sound odd, given that phenomenology is structured around lived experience, manifest in human beings. Phenomenology begins and ends with human experience, true. But the ego attending to phenomena in the world is not the ego of the personal self, but something far more impersonal. But we need not commit to the transcendental ego of Husserl to see this. What is given, at least initially, is anonymous in its spatio-temporal depth, yet to be registered as causing a particular affective response. We can talk, I think, of the anonymous earth: the earth that touches our bodies before self-reflection has had the opportunity to seize it as an idea. From this break in human depth, the world comes back to us as something wild in its anonymity. At once, both dense in texture but at the same time deprived of all its warmth. The tension between anonymity and depth is notable. We find ourselves in the world, and it is a world in which cultures have existed and vanished, some of those factors contributing to the identity of the self. At the same time, it is a world in human bodies visit before then departing.

Merleau-Ponty:

…it may well seem strange that the spontaneous acts through which man has patterned his life should be deposited, like some sediment, outside himself and lead an anonymous existence as things. The civilization in which I play my part exists for me in a self-evident way in the implements with which it provides itself. If it is a question of an unknown or alien civilization, then several manners of being or of living can find their place in the ruins or the broken instruments which I discover, or in the landscape through which I roam (Merleau-Ponty, 2006, p. 405).

We have in this passage a clue concerning the rediscovery of things in the world. Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to the world we find ourselves in. Already it is a world that is a strewn with the marks and inscriptions of a former existence. All around us, the world contains traces of life-world, which have since disbanded. Although anonymous, these same inscriptions persist, only now divorced from their origins. The earth runs through this place but fails to come out the other end. Instead, an ontological marshland has been forged. The damaged terrain contains its own history, and the history protrudes through the surface. Thus the original strangeness of what phenomenology discerns—the world opened up is at once both familiar and unfamiliar, charted and uncharted, earthly and alien.

Is the “earth” a concept or a thing given to us in experience? Deleuze writes: “The earth is not one element among others but rather brings together all the elements within a single embrace…” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 85). This sounds rather like the flesh of Merleau-Ponty, overlapping and entwining on itself, with each fold bringing in and releasing disparate aspects. Phrased another way: Is the “earth” a geological or metaphysical idea? While in the Husserl archives, Anthony Steinbock discovered a fragment dealing with “phenomenology as archaeology” (Steinbock, p. 89). Steinbock writes: “Phenomenological archaeology, [Husserl] writes, ‘digs up’ piecemeal the concealed constitutive structure that lie there ready-made for us as the world of experience” (Ibid.). (See also Steinbock’s excellent reading of Merleau-Ponty’s late “transcendental geology” note). If we augment the affective mode of this practice, then we can begin to speak legitimately about phenomenology as specialising in Xenoarchaeology—that branch of archaeology which concerns the past remnants of alien civilizations. Only now, the alien planet is the earth-world.

This Xenoarchaeological project has a question: what is to experience the materiality of things before those things are designated as “things” in the first place? The question is too big: it exceeds the sublime and the horrible, tearing asunder the body. Should we think, then, of the Levinasian “Il y a” or even the “apeiron” of Anaximander? The question of material monism hinges upon whether or not things ever really become “formless,” or, simply loses their familiarity of perception and drift into the realm of the uncanny. This is no simple question, since we cannot but helped but be placed by the Husserlian “zero-point” of the body. The body places us in the world. The body senses the world. The body is positioned. All of this underscores the transcendental reality of the “here.” The Earth is “here.” The “here.” “Here.”

The Rhapsody about Kancheli

2009-04-16T09:06:00.002Z

Surprised I didn't see this before: a four-part documentary on the Georgian composer, Giya Kancheli. Of course, I have no idea what is being said, but the general atmosphere is strong enough to convey the broad sense. Having had the nerve to dedicate my Aesthetics of Decay to Kancheli in 2006 (which he warmly accepted), I was then fortunate enough to meet him in London a year later. The documentary reminds me of his warmth and disarming, melancholy presence.

See also this striking performance of his "Having Wept" by the Latvian cellist, Kristine Blaumane. When, though, are we going to see a Kancheli symphony cycle in London?

The Reviewer's Ego

2009-04-03T20:05:00.008Z

Mikhail Emelianov has an interesting piece of the snide and unnecessarily personal nature of some academic reviews. I must confess, I find what emits from this exchange probably the most dispiriting aspect of academia – . I have never heard of either author mentioned in the blog post. But this doesn’t matter: the treatment is indicative of faults in publishing and philosophy broadly. After all, what is unfolding in this review is a series of already-programmed responses, deployed not primarily as a response to a reading, but to communicate an established hostility/opposition. Indeed, the manner in which the reviewer, Margaret Osler, writes is less about engaging with the book as a book, and more about appropriating the book as a secondary device for some other end. Easy to overlook just how odd this practice is in reality! Harder to imagine such a practice in, say, structural engineering - a subject as technical as philosophy but without the oppositional foundations. Not only this, but these types of reviews often conform to a formulaic structure, with their own homogenous statements, to be altered in any given context.

Characteristics of this genre of review might include: (1). Faulting the book because of a thematic/conceptual omission. (2). Faulting the book because of the titles it does or does not include in the bibliography, thus presupposing something prescriptive (yet totally arbitrary) as “a requisite familiarity” with the main materials (3). Faulting the book on account of a difference in tone from that of the reviewer’s. (4). Faulting the book on account of a marked difference in the reviewer's political values. (One can think back here to Barbara Hopper's bizarre response to the supposedly "phallogocentric" work of Ed. Casey. One can also think of a recent review done by a well-known blogger, the political leanings of whom meant that the review never had a chance from the outset). This kind of bad faith is strangely overlooked where reviews are concerned.

All of these assorted criticisms are essentially vacuous in content. They address nothing in structurally positive terms, but simply point out absences and lacks. The idea, for instance, that a book somehow falls short simply by not attending to the “primary” literature on any given topic is depressing beyond all words. Why is philosophy, in particular, so susceptible to this insidious need to publically register the latest fashions and so unapologetic in its shameless vanity when doing so? God forbid the idea of a philosophy that strives for independence from the “community of like-minded thinkers,” let alone attempts to do more than add to the bulging corpus of exegetical commentaries on the current master thinker(s).

It is hard to see the motivation for this structurally negative reviewing as anything more than a strategic and self-serving one-upmanship. The strategy is worn, but endures, no doubt thanks to inextricable link between academia and the authority of the personal ego, cocooned at all costs from being usurped.

Against Non-Places

2009-03-30T14:07:00.004Z

Having dusted myself down from my hotel occupancy, I have now returned to the world only to find that the Marc Augé’s “seminal” book Non-Places has gone into a second edition. Have I been in hibernation that long? I suspect that this book has done more harm than good. On the one hand, it has spawned a kind of uncritical fetish for places that have become synonymous with “late modernity” – airports, transport terminals, supermarkets, Ikea, etc. One sees evidence of this at most conferences on space and place – digressive, ill-thought excursions into the “enigma” of the hallway. As soon as the mystification becomes kitsch, all critical engagement is given over to an aesthetic pandering of the urban landscape.

True, I have spent most of the last few years thinking about these places myself. But by beginning with the independence of the human body, I have attempted to retain a distance from any preformed, cognitive assessment of place. After all, it is the body that has the final world on our experience of place. What is problematic about Augé’s argument (and influence) is the uncritical implication that some places give themselves over to certain modes of embodiment and temporality simply by dint of their cultural status. So, the result is that that airport, for example, becomes emblematic of the “human condition.” This is all wrong. As David Kolb has argued in his mostly excellent book, Sprawling Places, "place" ought to be a neutral term, with no need for an evaluative dissection. In my terms, place must retain its original anonymity in the face of human colonisation.

But there’s worse to come. Augé’s spurious division between place and non-place has the undesirable effect of producing a pre-emptive nostalgia for airports, train terminals, etc. Consider this rather saccharine “review” in the Guardian by PD Smith: “anthropologist Marc Augé's book is a haunting analysis of modern life and in particular those homogenised "non-places" where we spend so much of our time.” Key here is the inclusion of “haunting.” If the analysis is to be “haunting,” then it would have to involve the idea of something coming-to-light in the non-places. This would mean that the airport gains the distinction of being structurally parallel to something like the Hegelian spirit. A “haunting” is a very compelling, seductive notion. Hauntings confer depth on places, where depth is otherwise refused. But a haunting can also be seen as a human value laden on anonymity and the death of presence. If we are to talk about being “haunted” by non-places, then it is surely in terms of being haunted by an occult operation of the human subject elevating the world to a certain privileged status.

There is more. For PD Smith, non-places “exist beyond history, relations and the game of identity.” As “beyond,” Smith reinforces the idea that non-places are somehow transcendental to a normative conception as to how places ought to be. This is a shame. Whether or not airports challenge the formation of personal and public identity is a good question to ask. But the question does entail the idea that “place” and “identity” are somehow left behind in the wake of non-places, fragmented and ruined. The experience of boredom in the departure lounge does not undermine identity any more than the experience of boredom in the house does.

But the worst is saved for the last: “The forces of globalisation and urbanisation are creating ever more of these Ballardian non-places, symptoms of a Muzak-filled supermodernity in which ‘people are always, and never, at home.’” Actually, Ballard who is one of the very few writers not to prescribe an evaluative attachment to Shpperton, the suburban landscape he has focused upon. Rather, Ballard’s writing exemplify the original strangeness of place in its raw phenomenality, such that what arises is something more like the fluid materiality of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh” (one need only think here of Ballard’s genuinely haunting story “The Enormous Space” to see how divisions in place are ultimately at the mercy of the benevolent pathology of the human body).

Breakfast

2009-03-17T10:52:00.004Z

Room 9

2009-03-16T21:25:00.006Z

I am currently living in a hotel. From behind this window, I can see the alleyway where I used to walk Rosie and Millie. Indeed, if I poke my head out, I can identify the exact spot they liked to piss on. It is a small turf of green grass stuck in the concrete of a stranger’s driveway. From this angle, the territorial appeal of the particular spot makes sense. The view across my room leads into a skyscraper, the windows twinkling like off-world stars in the endless cosmos. I pause to consider the galaxy of alien life. Here, I see someone stretching; there another person slumped on their chair, no doubt basking in the glow of their microwaved pasta. If I wasn’t in such a hurry when I left, then I would have collected my monocular to observe these movements in more precise detail. But this is a small room and it will be hard to assess how long one individual can live here without risk of cabin fever. Indeed, there is no small danger of catching an existential bout of terminal burrowing presently, the chief symptom of which is a primitive but anguished retreat toward corners, alcoves, and nooks. Chief of my worries is the shower in the corner of the room, which does not make sense to me. In time, the moisture on this purple carpet will cause a problem, both conceptually and empirically. Like Millie and Rosie, I must leave the room and use the public outhouse to relief myself. When faced with a busy time, I will be obliged to queue in an orderly manner with the other guests. Perhaps I will give up and return to room 9 and try again later. On the other hand, I have not seen anyone else in the hotel except the Polish girl on the desk. All is silent and there are no lights seething from beneath the doors. Perhaps though, I have stumbled into a vacant hotel, a proverbial Bermuda Triangle in the middle of the city, consuming all life that enters into its reach. Tomorrow's breakfast will be the judge. But right now it matters neither way. We adapt to our terrain and wait for good news to come. Tomorrow I teach Hegel, tonight I must prepare. These are truly the busiest of days.

My hand went unconscious

2009-03-15T13:06:00.005Z

My hand went unconscious. I lost feeling under the table, as a cold freeze set in. I can only describe it as a kind of vertigo experienced in the palm of my hand. And then a kind of stiffing occurred. Borderline panic, white lights, and a gripping of the nearest physical surface. I have been here before. It was during early 2008 that my hand first became the site of an internal dispute, the nature of which I have yet to discern. Indeed, the reprisal of this oceanic movement in my hand confirms my belief that the body’s anxieties unfold temporally in such a way that cognitive apprehension falls to the background.

Back then, however, I had a good reason for this partial lapse in consciousness. Forced—against my nature—to inhabit the social world, I found myself in a series of melancholy meetings with strangers. There was London Zoo, Gordon’s Wine Bar, the National Gallery, Holland Park, a flower market, Brick Lane, and a few more. Of those meetings, though, my hand reached a precise crippling point one night in Covent Garden with an artist. We sat in a large bar. Her face was attentive, her eyes keen, and she expressed interest in phenomenology. I liked her description of it as “slowing time down” and found the rocking motion of her head appealing, as I reported on Bachelard’s notion of oneirism. But the lights were harsh in this region of London, and the cluster of human beings around me was causing my hand to dispatch itself from the rest of my body, as though it was making a leap for the exit before I was. Nevertheless, I seized the legs of the oak table while feeling motion sickness tear through me. She retained her smile, the strawberry beers remained in place. But although holding ground, I had soon resigned myself to the existential dis-ease murmuring in my left hand. Despite giving her a copy of Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side, I knew I’d never see her again, and worse still the book. Soon after, I left and was instantly eased by the low light of the street lamps and the anonymity of the world.

Those where eerie days. Inhabiting someone else’s house, I also inhabited these other pockets of alien worlds, with their fluorescent lightening and breezy climates. One afternoon, I arranged to meet an actress in the atrium of a hotel. We both looked out onto the rain and the sea. I gripped a faux marble pillar next to me, and asked to take her picture. She sat uncomfortably, aware that my motive was less a celebration of a cherished moment and more an attempt at seizing a moment of dysfunction. I arranged things clinically and took the shot. Sometime later, when my hand had re-inserted itself into my body, I returned to the spot and relived the moment from the mirroring perspective.

From Airports to Asylums '09

2009-03-06T11:40:00.003Z

Once again, I will be running my From Airports to Asylums course over the summer at Sussex, looking at place, memory, identity. It worked out pretty good last year, culminating in being thrown out of a derelict cement works. I hope to repeat that experience with my students this year. See below for an illustration of how well a selection of last year's students adapted to their environment.

I have also made a few changes to the course in an effort to make it more "accessible." This essentially means: less Heidegger. In his place, I have two new modules. One on ghosts (Sebald/J-Horror). The second on the uncanny (Ballard/Lovecraft). A full reading list can be found here. The course is open to all. Runs from 29 June - 24 July

The Alien Virus I

2009-02-15T22:05:00.006Z

Toward a consolidation of all that has fallen from the lens of reason. Consigned to the dusk of an obliterated life-world. And then, set far out to sea, amid a rocky surface in which only endangered animals roam. Tonight, the world has gone silent. We are facing a horizon, in which memory is detaching itself from time and occupying a colonised zone close to surface of the Earth. The payload is precious.

(Image from Elena Dawson)

Earlier this week, Havi Carel came to Sussex. Her talk was on illness. Her talk was aimed at inserting phenomenology into the world of clinical medicine. For Carel, phenomenology breeds hope. The hope is founded in the idea that by attending to the primacy of lived experience, a richer account of illness can be put forward, in which classification is displaced with a qualitative focus. Not only this, but Carel went on to argue that some degree of health is possible within the horizon of terminal illness, understood as a mode of “adaptation.” So, instead of illness being seen as a deficient mode of existence, via Merleau-Ponty, Carel suggested that a new life-world is conceived in the midst of illness, as unified as the previous mode (a claim she also expands upon in her excellent paper on Cronenberg’s The Fly and deals with more generally in her also excellent book on illness.)

However, while I admire Carel’s commitment to a renewed understanding of illness and disease, I worry. I wonder, for instance, if Carel’s idea that the body adapts to situations—a theme consistent throughout Cronenberg—neglects the independence of embodiment and memory. After all, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the phantom limb shows us, that while there is much that is brought into unity through the “intentional arc,” there is much that nevertheless remains sedimented in the body that is alien to the self. Does striving toward unity as a rational measure dispense with what the body hungers for of its own accord?

Tonight, I would like to think of memory in terms of an organism: that is, a living thing, with the potential to grow, decay, develop and, above all, maintain homeostatic regulation, the result of which is bodily stability. This recourse to biological terminology does not aim at a strictly physiological account of memory, however. Rather, thinking alongside memory as an organism means attending to memory as a lifeforce on its own terms, processing data in both a dynamic and independent manner. I have discussed elsewhere the idea of an uncharted experience of the past, which is given expression through the primacy of the body and manifest in a belated form. I need not go over that territory here. But what remains unsaid is the idea of memory as an alien virus.

Toward a Phenomenology of Millie

2009-01-26T13:59:00.005Z

She comes to me both day and night, her habits forming with my own. When I go to my armchair, she knows that it’s time to work her way into the groove of the armrest, so that she can rest her head on my leg. From behind her black fringe, she sniffs the cover of my book, glances toward me, and wags her tail. Similarly, when I lie down and stare at the high ceiling in order to channel my thoughts, her own thoughts appear to be directed toward lying on my chest. The pattern is repeated day-in-day-out. Do I imagine this reciprocity that exists between us, the shared correspondence that seems to occur through eye contact and bodily gestures? Or have I become a part of her lifeworld just as much as she has become part of mine?

How to approach this relation? I am wondering if a phenomenology of being-with-Millie can be constructed, such that the tension between a sentimental and human (alas, too human) anthropomorphism and a broadly dualistic framework can be reconciled/overcome. As part of my world, Millie nevertheless remains incommensurable with my own experience. For instance, it would be a disservice to try and argue for her interior life in terms of analogical evidence. To what extent we interact through habit cannot be asked in relation to human affairs. At the same time, I am prepared to say that the relation between us is more than mere materiality and far more than a coincidence of being together. There is a bond that is enduring and outlasts any given spatial environment.

If we pursue a strictly phenomenological account of being-with-animals, then the animal in question already becomes a part of my intersubjective lifeworld through being an object of intentionality. Of course, it was precisely this tactic that Heidegger pursued in his attempt to overcome the problem of other minds. But applied to Mille, Heidegger’s emphasis on the stretching-forth of consciousness risks assimilating the dog’s lifeworld into my own. We know already that Millie is “here” before she is spatially present. We know, too, that this proximity depends upon the varying circumstances in which we both find ourselves: our distance recedes and exceeds depending on each of our levels of attention. Her engagement with trying to prise the toy apart becomes my equivalent of reading, each of which affects our experience of the environment accordingly. But in what sense is ours a “shared” understanding? Of what things do we both co-inhabit simultaneously?

I return to the grooves of the armchair. To phrase this dual existence in terms of her employing the chair one way and me another seems to reduce our differences to something based in geometry alone. I can say that she has her “place” and I have mine, but this too simply seems to be extending a language of perceptual differences, in which we both find our way. There is only thing to do: I must turn to Millie. I must see the animative and dynamic dimension of body in relation to my own. For when she joins me in the chair or on the floor, our interaction is primarily an embodied one. Our shared language is taken up through our bodies: but does my body speak to her independently of cognition? Sometimes when greeting her it will be the case that I will place my forehead against hers. I will do this with my eyes shut, and more in a quasi-Buddhist way than to intimidate her. Something is bridged through that silence that has less to do with training and more to do with a fundamental sense of “being-with” this dog.

But this is too vague, too esoteric in its dealings with the “ineffable” bond between man and dog. Not that I wish to underplay the emphasis on compassion for animals, of which Schopenhauer was clearly the exemplar. But in order to straddle the line between materiality and a Romantic treatment of animals in the “wilderness,” I want to place Millie somewhere between an alien and a human. In the moments when I catch myself aware of this dark mass of hair and movement before me (although the same description could also apply to me), then something is triggered that returns the dog to her non-human status. I would not describe it as “wild being” in the manner of Merleau-Ponty, but more in line with the raw phenomenality of a being before a thing subsequently termed “Millie.” There is much to say here about “aliens” phenomenologically. Bernhard Waldenfels’ treatment of the alien in Husserl is excellent, as is the discussion of alienworld and homeworld in Anthony Steinbock’s Home and Beyond. Too much to take on this evening. But one lingering thought.

Husserl characterises the alien as “accessibility in genuine inaccessibility, in the mode of incomprehensibility” (cited in Waldenfels). It seems to me that this tension between openness and closeness is played out on the one hand in terms of a language of the body shared by human and animal. On the other hand, the non-commonality of human and animal is rooted precisely in a modification of this body language. Something is absent, yet something remains. The glance between Millie and I is both knowing and opaque simultaneously. Her own language does not conflate with mine, even though there is an ambiguous space set out in the world in which both of our gestures meet. Some kind of alien-home hybrid is the result.

(Millie on right, Rosie on left. Taken over Christmas.)

Horror, Lovecraft, Objects

2009-01-16T11:24:00.004Z

This year I am teaching political philosophy. Because of the time needed to re-familiarise myself of the Aristotle’s concept of justice, let alone contend spending time with someone as antipodal to me as John Rawls, other things have been displaced. I have not, for instance, had the chance to digest the recent swarm of enthusiasm for “object-oriented philosophy,” the focus of which is Graham Harman’s enjoyable new blog. Perhaps a better place to begin would be with Harman's articles here.

Having said that, I very much enjoyed Harman’s article on Lovecraft and phenomenology in the also excellent Collapse IV. I had some vague and ill-formed thoughts about the relation between phenomenology and strangeness a while ago. Since then, I have pursued the connection more systematically in the revised version of my thesis. Key for me is a passage from Merleau-Ponty’s article on Cezanne, in which we are introduced to “a creature of another species,” where I have used this motif as an invitation to voyage toward a repressed wilderness, a chance to examine memory specifically in post-human terms. More on that later, though.

In Harman’s article on Lovecraft and phenomenology, however, nothing less than a philosophy of “weird realism” is at stake. Bringing Husserl into the sphere of Lovecraft, he writes:

Just as Lovecraft turns prosaic New England towns into the battleground of extradimensional friends, Husserl’s phenomenology converts simple chairs and mailboxes into elusive units that emit partial, contorted surfaces (Harman, 2008, p. 336).

Although the premise that Husserl “converts” objects is somewhat contentious—since it is surely the case that the elusive dimension of those objects is there all along—Harman touches on a fruitful relation between the prosaic and the otherworldly, which is implicit in the environment of the life-world itself. As Harman goes on to argue, unlike the enigma of the Kantian noumenal realm—which fundamentally precludes human understanding—Lovecraft’s world is terrifying precisely because of the incursion of “finite malignant beings” in a finite world (Ibid., p. 342). The reversal from a rational infinity to an irrational finitude draws Lovecraft’s own creatures into the everyday world, conferring upon them a spatio-temporal existence lacking in Kant’s noumenal sphere. The result of this invasion, for Harman, is “[h]umans cease to be masters in their own house,” while phenomenology itself becomes the breeding ground for horror (Ibid.).

Harman’s claim for phenomenology as horror hinges upon the inextricable bind between the reality of phenomenal objects and their aligning weirdness. As irreducible to a fixed set of properties, those “things” are thus constantly evading description, and instead give way to the yawning abyss that separates the phenomenality of things from their totality. Prising apart this unity is the disarming quality of intentionality, which, although firmly placing us in the world, nevertheless stands upon a precarious interplay between absence and presence (Ibid., p. 362). Citing Lovecraft, Harman writes:

Intentional object are everywhere and nowhere; they ‘bubble and blaspheme mindlessly’ at every point in the cosmos. Although vividly present as soon as we acknowledge them, intentional objects express their reality only by drawing neighbouring objects into their orbit, and these things in turn are only present by enslaving others (Ibid.)

Because of this excess in phenomenality, things in the world remain both elusive and insufficient, calling into question all modes of apprehending those things in an intelligible way. Harman’s own contribution to this abyss is to redirect the emphasis toward the “existential threat” at the heart of intentionality. In conferring an affective quality upon intentionality, he thematizes - successfully, I think - the brute weirdness unmasked through the phenomenological method.

Incoming

2009-01-06T11:26:00.002Z

Back soon when things have eased down. In the meantime, a couple of interesting things:

1. The new edition of Phaenex, on "Back to the Things Themselves (again)" The whole edition looks great, with articles by Casey and Iris Aravot, among others.
2. The new edition of Memory Studies on "Materializing Times: From Memory to Imagination" (in which I have an article on "The Place of Trauma").

My Future is in the Past

2008-12-31T14:08:00.004Z

All the best to friends and readers for the forthcoming year...

Oneiric Horror I

2008-12-26T18:58:00.008Z

A little while ago, my sleep was ruptured by the memory of an abandoned space ship. During this time, my dreams would come to a sudden halt, as the waking module of my consciousness implanted the memory into my nocturnal life. To be clear, my sleep was broken by a memory forcing its way into apparent respite. And so there I was, floating amid the rust and corrosion in an alien environment far from this home planet, Earth. There too were the sinewy corridors and damaged floors, with the moisture of pipes set loose by the erosion. As if to fortify the nature of this experience, this free-floating, zero-gravity movement into terror gained an oneiric dimension in its lack of a discernable centre. But far from the overlapping of harmonious chunks of architectural memory, now seized in a unified orbit, what materialised instead was a zero-gravity memory, unable to deorbit into atmospheric re-entry, and thus using the space station as a channelling device. In a word, oneiric horror.

Somewhere deep in the South Pacific exist the scattered remains of the Mir orbital station, torn apart during its own atmospheric re-entry in 2001. Until then, “Russia's Mir space station,” according to USA Today writing during that fateful year, “accumulated space dust, micrometeoroid impact spots and blasts of solar radiation that faded its paint.” As though to avoid damaging its mythological status, the decision was taken to return Mir to its home planet rather than suspend it in a state of morbid cosmic decay. After all, the question of to what extent the impact would prevent a hazard to human life on Earth is a more manageable one than whether a space station can be haunted?

However, far from developing an independent life of its own—a cosmic virus—Mir returned on path, failing to deviate from its course of self-destruction, and ending in a glorious burial at sea. But atmospheric re-entry can be returned, at least in terms of the trace it leaves behind, and the three stages of Earth’s assimilation—atmospheric drag, orbit transfer, and finally engine fire—do nothing to alter the ontological status of the abandoned Mir, apparently adrift in the solar system. The more pressing question concerns the nature of memory in stasis.

For a long time, we have thought of “ghosts” as inhabiting a material realm, appearing as a residue of the Cartesian cogito, and thereafter gravitating toward the location the ghost inhabited as a living thing. The ghost lingers, forms a disembodied energy, which nevertheless manifests itself symptomatically in space as it speaks through the rattling of things. All of which attests to the gravitational order of the genius loci. But this human version of the ghost is as facile and sentimental in its need for moral resolution as its living counterpart: through it, a chance communion is established, in which whatever remains from the life-world is finally redeemed of its excess. No sooner is that act committed, however, than a new version is created—equally pleading to be returned to its native home-world. To think beyond the human ghost, therefore, beyond the realm of the corporeal haunting, and toward the amorphous zone of the zero-gravity spectre, preserved in a state of intergalactic ex-situ conservation.

Venice in Peril

2008-12-15T18:12:00.011Z

“Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood
Nothing has budged! New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings,
Old neighbourhoods, are allegorical for me,
And my dear memories are heavier than stone”
(Baudelaire, “The Swan”)

Here in Venice, the water is closing in and everything is either dying or already living dead. Abandoned before the flooding, in the abandoned hotel, white cloth has been draped over the furniture. The mood is funeral despite the good nature of the inefficient Italian staff.

Time and again, I return to the fish market, which I have adopted as the centre of my Venice. This year, large red swathes of material have been hung on columns, giving the impression of an open-air surgical theatre.

Behind the scenes, large chunks of disgusting fish flesh are being dissected and displayed. The smell is conforming, due to its overwhelming rancour. Down below, however, smaller cuttings have made their way into the gaps of the surgical tables. As a result, a cluster of fresh claws and entrails have been caught up amid the cigarette ends in the drains.

Despite its morbid peril, the city casts a long shadow from the past. Here, for instance, is the place where I saw a large bird come to the end of its life five years ago.

I remember: its eyes pulsating, while its throat tightened. The more it suffered with a shortage of air, so the greater its eyes protruded from its small cranium. At the same time, the water that was trapped in its lungs prevented the bird from resuming flight. Instead, on a small corner of the Rialto Bridge, its wings flapped erratically on the concrete, sometimes managing to move an inch either way. Eventually, the step that it lay on formed a seamless current with the canal. At that point, the still juddering frame of the bird was suddenly collected by the lapping waves. The last thing: the agonised bird, its heavy wings, now drenched, beating on the surface of the shit stained canal, with one last throe of energy, flip over onto its front before dying.

At the San Michele cemetery meanwhile, the air is thick with eroticism and ritual. As new ground is being tugged out by diggers, in the background I can hear a simple melody coming from an electric greeting card. The card must have been blown by the wind, since the melody is caught in a loop.

Although a well fortified island, San Michele cemetery is also suffering from the flooding. The graves are moist here, and when walking around the perimeter of the island, one needs to tread with caution, in order to avoid slipping onto the sacred patch of soil where the dead rests.

Body Horror II

2008-11-18T20:46:00.008Z

I pose the question of whether the "straightening out...uniform" presents a challenge to Heidegger's anxious (and disembodied) subject in light of a traditional problem that finds its explicit articulation in Locke and Descartes: dismemberment. The pages of John Locke’s famous Essay are open; the section is “Of Identity and Diversity.” Locke is in the midst of discussing personal identity and memory. Locke’s distinction between “persons” and “men” concedes to an intimacy with the body, such that “the limbs of his body are to everyone a part of himself.” However, this level of ownership is immediately reversed once the limb has been severed: “Cut off a hand, and thereby separate it from that consciousness he had of its head, cold, and other affections, and it is then no longer a part of that which is himself, and more than the remotest part of matter.” (pp. 181–182). As I asked my student’s the other day: why must it be the case that dualism is taken from the question of whether there can be a mind without a body? Surely, given the impossibility of being able to conceive of spirit without occupying a particular place, the more pressing question is: can a body exist in a conscious state without a mind? I suspect the tension to this question has something to do with the ocular-centrism of philosophy, but that is another problem altogether.

Likewise, in Descartes dismemberment presents an equally pressing issue, phrased now as a problem of “divisibility.” The relation between dismemberment and divisibility comes up as one of the Cartesian arguments for dualism. The relevant line is concise: “I recognise that if a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off, nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind.” I am less interested in how these strands of thought contribute to classical problems in philosophy, and more with the fact that body parts are taken to be a rejoinder to the notion of a corporeal mind in the first instance. All I shall ask for the moment is the following: if we take “the man condemned to die [who] straightens out his uniform” as a gesture of being human, then does that emergent humanity depend upon an affective relation with body parts themselves? Can we, for instance, picture a scene in which artificial body parts - limbs - conspire together to produce a more "human" subject. Phrased another way, the question would be: does a prosthetic limb have a memory?

The problem is whether or not bodily unity is a given of experience or something modified alongside experience? I take Locke and Descartes’s worry about dismemberment seriously, since the emphasis on body parts is presented as undercutting the entwinement between cognition and flesh. But even here, the question is surrounded on all sides by the question of to what extent we are identifiable with our bodies. Since I have very much positioned myself in a phenomenological framework for some time now, albeit committed to pathological instances of embodiment, the unity of this relation has nevertheless been there from the outset. But just as strong as my commitment to phenomenology, is my broad sense that Schopenhauer was fundamentally right in thinking of the body—taken as both an object among many, but also a site of experience—as a manifestation of an anonymous will.

How to affectively respond to the sight of oneself as “only phenomenon or appearance of a will that is in itself groundless”? (p. 107). The body becomes the will visible, and in turn establishes its own independent colony, entirely aligned with the will’s “chief demands and desires.” (p. 108). And so we come to Schopenhauer’s great image of embodiment: “Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse; grasping hands and nimble feet correspond to the more indirect striving of the will which they represent” (Ibid.). In addition to the metaphysical dismemberment that is occurring in this passage, Schopenhauer also places the body in a parasitic relation to the will, such that flesh becomes nothing less than a symptomatic expression of the disease generating life.

The flesh, in its treachery, is diseased by its own genesis. As if there was any doubt as to the horrific kernel deployed in this image of the body as fundamentally exterior to the self, forever relegated to the status of being nothing more..., then by the time we reach the end of Schopenhauer’s treatment of the will and embodiment, all accounts of empowerment seem both remote and empty. At the service of an irreducible desire, Schopenhauer’s account of nature becomes overridden with account of animal life in conflict not only with each other, but also with their own bodies, culminating in the particularly vivid example of the bulldog-ant Australia:

“When it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head attacks the tail with its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head. The contest usually for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This takes place every time.” (p. 147).

Dismemberment and anonymity: two poles of the same flesh, prised apart before being reconstituted in a new form. I return to that crystalline image: empowerment. I acknowledge it now as a memory, something to be retraced. It is there in a moment of exhalation, and visible in the glossy sphere of a spiritually mute aesthetic design. And yet – no worse because of that spiritual impoverishment. Perhaps this was the source of my confusion: by mistaking empowerment as the conjuration of embodiment, I omitted the possibility that empowerment might equally be synonymous with disembodiment and displacement. Toward a phenomenology of empowerment? Such a route is perhaps only possible if we’re prepared to leave the body behind, however brief or long the sojourn might be.

Body Horror I

2008-11-17T17:47:00.012Z

“The human body is the best picture of the human soul” (Wittgenstein)

Once again, I must backtrack. Why was I so convinced that “empowerment” was the natural successor to anxiety? My procrastination to resume that post testifies to my uncertainty. My plan was broadly as follows: against Heidegger’s emphasis on anxiety, the thought would be that something like “jouissance” intervenes, and that because of this intervention, an account of anxiety and empowerment receptive to the lived dynamism of materiality would follow. I am only marginally interested in post-phenomenological uses of jouissance, since my thoughts for the most part were rooted in Levinas. As such, should I have pursued this path, I would have consulted a passage from Time and the Other:

And when one writes a book on anxiety, one writes it for someone, one goes through all the steps that separate the draft from the publication, and sometimes behaves like a merchant of anxiety. The man condemned to die straightens out his uniform before his last walk, accepts a final cigarette, and finds an eloquent word before the salvo (p. 60).

How do we get from disembodied anxiety to embodied empowerment? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I would be tempted to suggest through adopting an aesthetic outlook. “Straightens out his uniform.” This line has fascinated me for some time, as though death could be marshalled into a state of order through the composition of clothing. But I take the thought seriously: the relation between clothing – the fabric, cut, and style of an article of clothing – and one’s aligning sense of spatio-temporal orientation is neither arbitrary nor trivial. Elevated above flesh-vessel, the act of adjusting one’s outfit to fit the occasion, even death, marks an incipient kernel of empowerment, such that ownership is reclaimed.

But as I say, something intervened in this trajectory of thought before jouissance stamped its presence. Self-affirmation was thwarted. “The man condemned to die straightens out his uniform,” and yet does this afford any unity of the body hidden beneath that clothing? More specifically, does this essentially aesthetic gesture merit anything more than the production of a false resolution? I ask this question in the shadow of the anxious body, which, taken seriously, contests the embodied subject so privileged to phenomenology (cf. Michael Tweed's recent translation of Henry's "The Living Body"). Specifically, I have two worries: the first is concerned with the body as a collection of parts. The second is concerned with the body as a manifestation of an anonymous entity. I will sketch these out aloud tomorrow.

[Images from the excellent Tetsuo: The Iron Man by Shinya Tsukamoto]

The Living Body

2008-11-13T20:35:00.003Z

Somewhat tied up with various things. But do take the time out to browse a new blog discovery, which looks very promising: However Fallible, by Michael Tweed who has kindly translated Henry's The Living Body. (Thanks to Fido for the link). Back soon.

A Field Guide to Melancholy

2008-10-29T20:55:00.005Z

As though to perfectly coincide with the onset of winter, Jacky Bowring’s new book, A Field Guide to Melancholy has arrived. I am working through it, slowly. Already I sense it is a book that deserves to be read with a particular kind of pace. Somewhat like memory itself, a book that is conducive to a certain light and rhythm, full of both twilight and permanence simultaneously. Recommended.