Susan Sontag, I think of you!
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Saturday, January 09, 2021
Against Healing!
Friday, January 08, 2021
The Aryan Nation revolution will be televised
Blow after blow, the Trumpkins must be coming down from their high. Frist "Mr. Trump", as the NYT has taken to calling him - which is a sign that he really is expelled from the countrfy club - made a video in which he said his beloved Patriots were naughty naughty to try to take over the capitol and burn the electoral college ballots. Apparently, his aides said he could be prosecuted. Then the WSJ editorial board, which is close to God - that is, the God of the Right, Rupert Murdoch - said Trump should be impeached. A rare conjunction of AOC and the WSJ! So, shockingly, the fallback story that this was just an antifa false flag is shredded from the top, although I'd guess 90 percent of Trumpsters will soon be assuring all and sundry that the Capitol takeover was a Democratic Party plot. Then it appears the "protestors", as the NYT persistently calls the Aryan Nation gang that took over the Capitol, did kill a cop.
Tuesday, January 05, 2021
On balance
While the aesthetic sphere is full of objects corresponding
to the sense of sight or of hearing, there
are no objects directly correlating to the the sense of balance. Dance and sports
are the closest we get. Roger Caillois was clever in noticing the role
of dizziness in certain kinds of games, which he categorized under the rubric
ilynx. Caillois was not a systematic thinker; he was also a Cold War liberal of
the very anti-marxist type. These two facts have to be held in mind when
reading Jacques Ehrman’s terrific attack on Caillois in “Homo Ludens revisited”
(1968), which holds a special place in the history of deconstruction in
America. Ehrman’s attack must have
sounded like Martian in 1968, while now it is part of our lingo:
“For finally, if the status of "ordinary life," of
"reality," is not thrown into question in the very movement of
thought given over to play, the theoretical, logical, and anthropological bases
on which this thinking is based can only be extremely precarious and
contestable. In other words, we are criticizing these authors chiefly and most
seriously for considering "reality," the "real," as a given
component of the problem, as a referent needing no discussion, as a matter of
course, neutral and objective.”
Still, given the limitations of Caillois ideological adherence
to the White Mythology, it is also true that Caillois provides the elements for
throwing into question – that is, getting dizzied by – the “very moment of
thought given over to play.” Ehrman’s thesis has still not inflected our
official historiography, which looks towards vast economic forces, or a high
concept notion of politics, as its objects, and leaves aside such things as
drugs, inebriation, sport, etc. as minor concerns. You will find much more
about drugs and drug smuggling in journalistic history accounts than you will find
in any recent academic history of, for example, Cold War America, thus separating
“ordinary life” from the “extraordinary” life of the historical process.
The meeting of ordinary life and extraordinary life in the governance
of our somatic chemical structure does, I think, go back to how an official
sense of balance is maintained and idealized in the moral sphere. Ilynx is not
easily exorcized, and it pops up in philosophy too – that very peculiar discourse
of extraordinary life. Marx’s notion, or non-notion, of revolution plays an
illynx like role in his larger framing of modernity. Nietzsche’s notion of the “eternal return of
the same” – that reactionary version of revolution – is, I think, a form of
vertigo, of getting lost in time and space, in as much as time and space are
themselves lost, never original, always copied.
Emile Cioran, in the Twilight of Thoughts, writes about vertigo
as an existential expression of the most radical doubt. I think vertigo is an
important, maybe a governing condition in Cioran’s work. For Cioran, the
verticality of the human animal is primary to that animal’s domestication – it precedes
language. Vertigo is thus a strike against the empire of the human.
“Everything that is not inert must, in different degrees,
support itself. And how much more must man, who only accomplishes his destiny
inventing certitudes and only maintains his position by the tonic of illusions.
But he who begins to face himself, who slips into the transparency of his own
position, who is a man only through the indulgences of his memory, can he still
call upon the traditional support, his animal verticality, can he still hold
himself up when he is no longer himself?”
For Cioran, the fall into time is really a fall, a threat to
the backbone, a passage down and down the dark well. In Cioran’s opinion, a romantic anarchic one,
all of history is an injury to the sense of balance.
Which brings me to an instance of balance finding itself. I
saw this. I saw it this Sunday, in Parc Royal, when Adam showed me how he could
ride a bike. He had tried bike riding last year in Montpellier, but he never
made it past the stage of his parents
holding him up. This year, after ardently wishing for a bicycle, one appeared
under, or not really under but leaning next to, the Christmas tree. We took him
out to Parc Picasso, one cold Thursday, and went racing about with him. It was
A. who figured out that the perfect thing was to hold onto the back of his coat
while he pedalled along, his little helmet slopping jauntily over to one side.
She would let go for ten seconds, twenty. Then, catching up, hold again.
Saturday, I did not go with them to the Parc. And as I was sitting at home,
pretending to work, I received a video from A. It showed Adam biking by
himself. Biking all around the course in the Parc Royal! I was filled with a
parent bird feeling. The nestling spread its wings. The vacant air became a
living thing. The boy, 8 years old, attached to a metal frame and two wheels,
found his balance Tao. Joy filled the world.
The part that is left out by the thinkers of vertigo.
The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve
In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nar...
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t...
-
The most dangerous man the world has ever known was not Attila the Hun or Mao Zedong. He was not Adolf Hitler. In fact, the most dangerous m...
-
In messing around in the vaults – the vaults under the surface of history and literature, as per the posts of last week - LI recently came...