I sometimes get the feeling that, pursuing my set of themes in this blog, I tend to emit a volcanic eruption of instances and hints that bury the points, instead of doing what I should do, what I, as an editor, am always urging on others: taking the points and putting them, all shiny and new, in the shopwindow.
So let me take hold of the point that has been in travail and woe since I took up Kierkegaard: boredom. The point can be put like this: whereas, in the ancient world, and in the Christian world, the taming of the passions and the life that was liberated from the press of necessity by the discipline of askesis was a holy life, or, at least for the Stoics, a natural one, in the culture of happiness, this life is one constantly beset by boredom. In the worlds ruled over by fate or providence, worlds in which, in the end, there was a celestial balance to bow down to – worlds, that is, under the impress of the limited good – lifting necessity through a purification of the impressions or an impoverishment of the desires did correspond to a true insight about the world. We should remember, as well, that passion was felt, in these worlds, within the system of humors, within the structure of characters and temperaments. Not so, however, in the world in which Chronos, or growth, had displaced all other horizons. Chronos the capitalist, who revolutionized the world through trade and exploitation. This is a world so different in its orientation and instincts that it has been imposed on the disbelieving populaces of the world at the cost of millions of lives. However, in this world, for , at first, the circulating labor class, the non-necessary necessity – boredom – became a real social experience, a sign and a symbol, a puzzle.
As I’ve tried to show, this experience is seized upon by philosophers, writers and psychologists in the first half of the nineteenth century, who all seem to find boredom a very modern affair. And, in fact, in the realm of non-necessary necessity, they revive an old trope – paradise. Boredom is a special concern in paradise, and paradise itself, it turns out, is the most modern thing of all.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
The influence of civilization on madness
Alexandre Brierre de Boismont is one of the touchstones of research on boredom and suicide. Baudelaire read his essay on l’ennui – or at least references it in his notebook. Foucault, in his lectures on psychiatric power, mentions de Boismont’s clinic at Saint Antoine, in which the doctor consciously familialized his relations with his patients – they were to consider him a father, and his wife a mother. Elizabeth Goodstein recognizes him, in Experience without Qualities, as the doctor who is most associated with modernizing “the modern topos of ennui as a disease of civilization.” [129] Boismont himself, in his essay on l’ennui, taedium vitae, refers to a talk on the “influence of civilization on madness” that he gave in the 1820s. Boredom – or something like boredom, something like Langeweile, something like tedium, something called l’ennui – was at the center of Boismont’s contention. Boismont was born in Rouen in 1797 (where his father, on his birth certificate, is listed as vivant de son revenue”[Goldstein, 387], and studied in Paris, where he mixed with Esquirol’s circle. He had, by the 1840s when he published his study of l’ennui, plenty of clinical experience in Paris, mixing with the most advanced clinicians.
Boismont’s historical analysis of l’ennui is not just the background of his theory, but an inseperable accompaniment – for Boismont needs to show, at least, a quantitative change in the incidence of l’ennui over time. He traces the disease back to Seneca, then through the church fathers and, rapidly, through the middle ages. From Boismont’s point of view, the interesting thing is the connection between l’ennui and suicide – it is suicide that allows us, so to speak, to medicalize the feeling. But because all incidences of boredom don’t result in suicide, there must exist a, so to speak, non-pathological variant of l’ennui. And is this effected by, even created by, ‘civilization’? It is interesting how he deals with this point when he comes to the seventeenth century and, so to speak, thrusts l’ennui into the heart of French history:
“In the seventeenth century, l’ennui gnawed at the heart of Louis XIV and it was this wound that madame de Maintenon was charged with ceaselessly dressing. But as that celebrated woman represents the triumph of private life, and as that private life, says H Saint Marc Girardin, fell into the sloth (l’oisiveté) of the palace, she had the disease of l’ennui in such a way that madame de Maintenon at Versailles was at the same time the heroine and martyr of private life. What a martyrdom I suffered, she said at Saint Cyr after the death of Louis XIV, in her conversations with madame de Glapion, and in what straits I passed my life while they thought I was the happiest woman in the world!”
In Boismont’s account, private life may be the supportive milieu for l’ennui – but it was the eighteenth century that invented the carrier: philosophy. And it was a woman, du Deffand, who was the exemplary victim and heroine – who was gifted, or injured, by the ability to see to the empty bottom of all things, and who called this vision “l’ennui”.
Boismont’s views in 1850 have been circulating among other doctors and popularizers even in the 1830s, so it is not historically fantastic to conjoin, here, this notion of a philosophical disease and the remarks Büchner puts in Prince Leonce’s mouth. Let’s tie l’ennui a little closer to politics – in a speculative mode, under the conditional. What, after all, is wichtig? What is this emptiness of Deffand’s? These are not simply speculative issues – for Boismont and for Büchner. Or I should say that speculation, here, has a strange material power. In the French revolution, the question of what – and who – was important was asked with an intensity, and produced an activity, that distinguished it from the American revolution. In the latter, the problem of what was important was settled: the settler was more important than the indian or the slave, and his importance was measured by his rights, which were inalienable. But there came a moment in the French revolution, a moment of social eeriness, a moment of terror, where it was not at all clear what was important, and to whom, and what the measure of importance was. This eeriness is still something that jumps out from our histories, and draws its dividing party line among the historians.
But again – what is l’ennui? In Boismont’s essay, it is not only a disease of modernity, but a recapitulation – a negative recapitulation – of the revolution. The torch of terror is not led by hope, here, but by hopelessness. There is no key to liberty in l’ennui.
To mix Kierkegaard with Boismont, in l’ennui, freedom loses the motive to repeat itself.
Another name for boredom might be: fatelessness.
Boismont’s historical analysis of l’ennui is not just the background of his theory, but an inseperable accompaniment – for Boismont needs to show, at least, a quantitative change in the incidence of l’ennui over time. He traces the disease back to Seneca, then through the church fathers and, rapidly, through the middle ages. From Boismont’s point of view, the interesting thing is the connection between l’ennui and suicide – it is suicide that allows us, so to speak, to medicalize the feeling. But because all incidences of boredom don’t result in suicide, there must exist a, so to speak, non-pathological variant of l’ennui. And is this effected by, even created by, ‘civilization’? It is interesting how he deals with this point when he comes to the seventeenth century and, so to speak, thrusts l’ennui into the heart of French history:
“In the seventeenth century, l’ennui gnawed at the heart of Louis XIV and it was this wound that madame de Maintenon was charged with ceaselessly dressing. But as that celebrated woman represents the triumph of private life, and as that private life, says H Saint Marc Girardin, fell into the sloth (l’oisiveté) of the palace, she had the disease of l’ennui in such a way that madame de Maintenon at Versailles was at the same time the heroine and martyr of private life. What a martyrdom I suffered, she said at Saint Cyr after the death of Louis XIV, in her conversations with madame de Glapion, and in what straits I passed my life while they thought I was the happiest woman in the world!”
In Boismont’s account, private life may be the supportive milieu for l’ennui – but it was the eighteenth century that invented the carrier: philosophy. And it was a woman, du Deffand, who was the exemplary victim and heroine – who was gifted, or injured, by the ability to see to the empty bottom of all things, and who called this vision “l’ennui”.
Boismont’s views in 1850 have been circulating among other doctors and popularizers even in the 1830s, so it is not historically fantastic to conjoin, here, this notion of a philosophical disease and the remarks Büchner puts in Prince Leonce’s mouth. Let’s tie l’ennui a little closer to politics – in a speculative mode, under the conditional. What, after all, is wichtig? What is this emptiness of Deffand’s? These are not simply speculative issues – for Boismont and for Büchner. Or I should say that speculation, here, has a strange material power. In the French revolution, the question of what – and who – was important was asked with an intensity, and produced an activity, that distinguished it from the American revolution. In the latter, the problem of what was important was settled: the settler was more important than the indian or the slave, and his importance was measured by his rights, which were inalienable. But there came a moment in the French revolution, a moment of social eeriness, a moment of terror, where it was not at all clear what was important, and to whom, and what the measure of importance was. This eeriness is still something that jumps out from our histories, and draws its dividing party line among the historians.
But again – what is l’ennui? In Boismont’s essay, it is not only a disease of modernity, but a recapitulation – a negative recapitulation – of the revolution. The torch of terror is not led by hope, here, but by hopelessness. There is no key to liberty in l’ennui.
To mix Kierkegaard with Boismont, in l’ennui, freedom loses the motive to repeat itself.
Another name for boredom might be: fatelessness.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
the visions of the bored
Was die Leute nicht alles aus Langeweile treiben! Sie studieren aus Langeweile, sie beten aus Langeweile, sie verlieben, verheiraten und vermehren sich aus Langeweile und sterben endlich aus Langeweile, und – und das ist der Humor davon – alles mit den wichtigsten Gesichtern, ohne zu merken, warum, und meinen Gott weiß was dazu. Alle diese Helden, diese Genies, diese Dummköpfe, diese Heiligen, diese Sünder, diese Familienväter sind im Grunde nichts als raffinierte Müßiggänger. – Warum muß ich es gerade wissen? Warum kann ich mir nicht wichtig werden und der armen Puppe einen Frack anziehen und einen Regenschirm in die Hand geben, daß sie sehr rechtlich und sehr nützlich und sehr moralisch würde?
What don’t people do out of boredom. The study out of boredom, they pray out of boredom, they fall in love, marry and multiply out of boredom and finally they die out of boredom… and, this is the funny thing – do this all with the most important faces, without seeing, why, and God knows for what purpose. All these heros, these geniuses, these imbeciles, this saints, these sinners, this family men are fundamentally nothing more than refined loungers. But why do I know this? What can’t I take myself seriously and dress the poor doll up in a frock coat, with an umbrella in his hand, in order for it to become very proper and sober and moral? – Leonce and Lena
I began this interlude in Strassburg, 1831. Büchner, 18, arrives there in November, in time to get involved with the student greeting of the Polish hero, R. Of course, the greeting was produced not simply to show sympathy with Poland, but contempt for the former liberals who were now forming a centrist group, Since the editor of Büchner’s works first drew attention to this letter in the 1870s, it has been interpreted in ways to shed light on Büchner’s radical politics, and this has become the Leitfaden in Büchner studies – is this the young man, so ardently longed for, standing in the sun with his gun? Or is this another poseur? But I am interested in the way that Büchner, even at 18, saw double – he saw that politics was ‘important’, and he saw that it was theater – and that he cast this vision over the whole of life. Is this double vision the characteristic propositional attitude of the bored? Belief and non-belief, a binocular attitude that does not negate itself, but does not take itself ‘seriously’?
What don’t people do out of boredom. The study out of boredom, they pray out of boredom, they fall in love, marry and multiply out of boredom and finally they die out of boredom… and, this is the funny thing – do this all with the most important faces, without seeing, why, and God knows for what purpose. All these heros, these geniuses, these imbeciles, this saints, these sinners, this family men are fundamentally nothing more than refined loungers. But why do I know this? What can’t I take myself seriously and dress the poor doll up in a frock coat, with an umbrella in his hand, in order for it to become very proper and sober and moral? – Leonce and Lena
I began this interlude in Strassburg, 1831. Büchner, 18, arrives there in November, in time to get involved with the student greeting of the Polish hero, R. Of course, the greeting was produced not simply to show sympathy with Poland, but contempt for the former liberals who were now forming a centrist group, Since the editor of Büchner’s works first drew attention to this letter in the 1870s, it has been interpreted in ways to shed light on Büchner’s radical politics, and this has become the Leitfaden in Büchner studies – is this the young man, so ardently longed for, standing in the sun with his gun? Or is this another poseur? But I am interested in the way that Büchner, even at 18, saw double – he saw that politics was ‘important’, and he saw that it was theater – and that he cast this vision over the whole of life. Is this double vision the characteristic propositional attitude of the bored? Belief and non-belief, a binocular attitude that does not negate itself, but does not take itself ‘seriously’?
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Defending myself against the materialist attacks of my conscience
Now we're gonna be face to face
As I lay right down in my favorite place
When Emile Tardieu published his book on L’ennui, a reviewer in the Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane in 1905 reproached him for taking much of his data from the belles letters, which “proves little.” Today’s Tardieus, notably Elizabeth S. Goodstein, in Experience without Qualities: boredom and modernity, also references, besides such writers as Tardieu, of course, the same writers Tardieu mentions, from Senacour to Flaubert and Baudelaire. Goldstein is an infinitely cleverer methodologist than Tardieu, and defends herself by taking up the thesis that if we are to look for affective changes, or changes in the interpretation of effect, in a culture, we should look in the discourse – we should look in the rhetoric, our collective sensorium for the registration of mood.
I, too, am going down this route, and I’m not quite satisfied with the unanchored discourse defense of gathering evidence among the literati. Rather, I think there are good sociological reasons to say that discourse itself changes in modernity – that a greater space is taken up, materially, by the “third life” as a result of urbanization and literacy, which thrust into the everyday life of the people a more crowded and changing visual and symbolic vernacular – books, signs, songs, paintings, vaudeville, and of course the technologies for reproducing the ‘work of art”. In Dostoevsky’s The Devils, there is a joke about the fact that one day, public opinion ‘appeared’ in Russia and became subject to discussion in Stepan Verkhovensky’s little circle. Engels in the Position of the Working Class discusses public opinion, similarly, as a semi-institutionalized force in the advanced countries. Discourse is not some abstract universal, but a form subject to variation and tied down by a thousand Lilliputian strings to everyday life. And as it was commodified, industrialized, massified, there is no doubt that its producers – its clerks – were aware that there was a new power under their fingertips – if they only knew it. Nietzsche was certainly not crazy to think that, in spite of selling a couple thousand books, he was dynamite – the feeling that one has written something that will be read, that bears its audience with it into the future, is in one way a very clear response to what was happening to ‘discourse’.
There is, of course, another aspect to the expansion and entrenchment of the third life. As I have often pointed out – go back to the post on November 21, 2008, for instance – what demographers discovered in the sixties and seventies – the shift in the composition of the Stem-household in Northwest Europe, in which males no longer brought their wives home to the patriarchal manse – created a discontinuity in bio-social time that became “youth”. Look at the aliens in the artificial paradise, so many of them are marked by bachelorhood – Baudelaire, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Youth, which becomes, on a large scale, identified with the third life – with learning to read, with reading, with, among the members of the circulation class, reading as a identity shaping event – is both symbol and audience, here. The novel of apprenticeship, Moretti’s central novelistic form, reflected the golden age in which it was to be read.
Happiness, as we have pointed out for the last three years, is a total social fact. To a certain extent, boredom, l’ennui, Langeweile, is too. Tardieu, who we will look at later, found it at the root of modernity itself. I have a more complicated story than that.
The court rests.
As I lay right down in my favorite place
When Emile Tardieu published his book on L’ennui, a reviewer in the Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane in 1905 reproached him for taking much of his data from the belles letters, which “proves little.” Today’s Tardieus, notably Elizabeth S. Goodstein, in Experience without Qualities: boredom and modernity, also references, besides such writers as Tardieu, of course, the same writers Tardieu mentions, from Senacour to Flaubert and Baudelaire. Goldstein is an infinitely cleverer methodologist than Tardieu, and defends herself by taking up the thesis that if we are to look for affective changes, or changes in the interpretation of effect, in a culture, we should look in the discourse – we should look in the rhetoric, our collective sensorium for the registration of mood.
I, too, am going down this route, and I’m not quite satisfied with the unanchored discourse defense of gathering evidence among the literati. Rather, I think there are good sociological reasons to say that discourse itself changes in modernity – that a greater space is taken up, materially, by the “third life” as a result of urbanization and literacy, which thrust into the everyday life of the people a more crowded and changing visual and symbolic vernacular – books, signs, songs, paintings, vaudeville, and of course the technologies for reproducing the ‘work of art”. In Dostoevsky’s The Devils, there is a joke about the fact that one day, public opinion ‘appeared’ in Russia and became subject to discussion in Stepan Verkhovensky’s little circle. Engels in the Position of the Working Class discusses public opinion, similarly, as a semi-institutionalized force in the advanced countries. Discourse is not some abstract universal, but a form subject to variation and tied down by a thousand Lilliputian strings to everyday life. And as it was commodified, industrialized, massified, there is no doubt that its producers – its clerks – were aware that there was a new power under their fingertips – if they only knew it. Nietzsche was certainly not crazy to think that, in spite of selling a couple thousand books, he was dynamite – the feeling that one has written something that will be read, that bears its audience with it into the future, is in one way a very clear response to what was happening to ‘discourse’.
There is, of course, another aspect to the expansion and entrenchment of the third life. As I have often pointed out – go back to the post on November 21, 2008, for instance – what demographers discovered in the sixties and seventies – the shift in the composition of the Stem-household in Northwest Europe, in which males no longer brought their wives home to the patriarchal manse – created a discontinuity in bio-social time that became “youth”. Look at the aliens in the artificial paradise, so many of them are marked by bachelorhood – Baudelaire, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Youth, which becomes, on a large scale, identified with the third life – with learning to read, with reading, with, among the members of the circulation class, reading as a identity shaping event – is both symbol and audience, here. The novel of apprenticeship, Moretti’s central novelistic form, reflected the golden age in which it was to be read.
Happiness, as we have pointed out for the last three years, is a total social fact. To a certain extent, boredom, l’ennui, Langeweile, is too. Tardieu, who we will look at later, found it at the root of modernity itself. I have a more complicated story than that.
The court rests.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Places and people: bored Europe
The year 1831 in Strasbourg, according to the city chronicle written by Charles Staehling, saw the return of reaction after the liberal revolution that had put Louis-Philippe in power. Strasbourg had been a hotbed of liberalism under Charles X; its chief notable, Frederic Turckheim, had allied himself with Benjamin Constant. But in 1831, Turckheim, who had been appointed mayor of the city by the king, tried to deflect the liberal momentum, for instance by advocating the disbanding of the national guard, and then, when that didn’t work, operating to elevate reactionary officers. Of course, the university – and especially the medical students – were notoriously to the left. Surely they took part in the charivari that greeted Turckheim in the summer of that year, when he and his associates – the respectable middle class – took to calling themselves the Juste-Milieu, after a phrase of the King’s.
And this is a scene from the year of the juste milieu, preserved in amber by Staehling:
“The brasseurs of Strasbourg sent to Paris three delegates, MM. Schott of the Tigre, JJ Lauth of the Chain and Wagner of the Ostrich in order to complain about certain vexing measures of indirect taxation. Presented by the baron Athalin, deputy of the Bas Rhin, they were admitted to an audience with the king who, says the journal, welcomed them with much beneficence and expressed very flattering sentiments for their department.”
The juste milieu could not hold from the very beginning. The king and the restauranteurs, brought together by a Balzacian baron, are a sort of omen that the order cannot last. The Lord, it says in Revelations, spews the lukewarm out of his mouth.
But even if the liberal momentum was stopped, romantic nationalism, with which a certain liberalism was associated, wept its tears that year for the aborted revolt in Poland. A Polish general, Ramorino (who, it turned out from evidence supplied later, had probably been paid off by the Russians) was feted in Strasbourg as he passed through on his way to Paris. The liberals mixed up sentiment for defeated Poland and sentiment for the defeat of liberalism in the celebration accorded to the general. Which is where I will start this parenthesis. With a letter written by an 18 year old medical student that detailed these events to his parents: Georg Buechner.
And this is a scene from the year of the juste milieu, preserved in amber by Staehling:
“The brasseurs of Strasbourg sent to Paris three delegates, MM. Schott of the Tigre, JJ Lauth of the Chain and Wagner of the Ostrich in order to complain about certain vexing measures of indirect taxation. Presented by the baron Athalin, deputy of the Bas Rhin, they were admitted to an audience with the king who, says the journal, welcomed them with much beneficence and expressed very flattering sentiments for their department.”
The juste milieu could not hold from the very beginning. The king and the restauranteurs, brought together by a Balzacian baron, are a sort of omen that the order cannot last. The Lord, it says in Revelations, spews the lukewarm out of his mouth.
But even if the liberal momentum was stopped, romantic nationalism, with which a certain liberalism was associated, wept its tears that year for the aborted revolt in Poland. A Polish general, Ramorino (who, it turned out from evidence supplied later, had probably been paid off by the Russians) was feted in Strasbourg as he passed through on his way to Paris. The liberals mixed up sentiment for defeated Poland and sentiment for the defeat of liberalism in the celebration accorded to the general. Which is where I will start this parenthesis. With a letter written by an 18 year old medical student that detailed these events to his parents: Georg Buechner.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
More Kierkegaardian notes - for Mr. T.
I’m going to range a bit in these notes.
A. the real paradise
In a footnote to the Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard references a theory propounded by F. Baader about the Fall – namely, that the Fall must be seen under the category of temptation. Baader is one of those German thinkers who toil up the back staircase to the Castle, unlike Hegel, and thus is praised for his “usual authority and vigor” – and yet here, Kierkegaard can’t go the extra step with him: “Baader seems to me to have neglected some intermediate elements. To pass from innocence to error by nothing other than the concept of temptation risks giving God, in his relation to man, almost the role of the experimenter, and in this way neglects the intermediary, psychological observation, for after all, the intermediary is concupiscentia.” [Translation from the French translation]
There is, here, an echo – a repetition interrupted. Kierkegaard’s scenario, again and again, consists of two men and one girl. The game is played in two moves, which are allotted to the two men: the first man observes the other man and woman – as Constantin Constantius observes the young man in Repetition. Eve is erased rather quickly in the Concept of Anguish – whereas, for Constantius, the young girl is a kind of “bait” for the young man. In the latter scenario, the young man “falls” for the young woman – in the scenario of the Fall, Adam falls, in a sense, for desire itself. The point for the experimenters is not to elicit a response from the girl, but from the man.
The second move in the game is allotted to the young man – or to Adam, although Adam does not write letters. The young man views the girl under two contrary impulses: to love her, or to flee from her – the latter being, indeed, the essence of the former. The young man in Repetition does not annul the girl – as Eve is erased in the story of the Fall – but he substitutes, for annuling her, fleeing from her. He does not, however, fall into Constantius’ experiment. Remember, Constantius proposes the course of fleeing her by deceiving her into thinking that he – the young man – is actually a libertine. Constantius even finds another girl – a working girl, of course, a shop girl, in a boutique – a milieu Kierkegaard must have known about. Indeed, his mother was, in a way, a shop girl. This erased Eve was supposed to be a decoy upon which the young lover was to – leave no mark. But Constantius’ plan was fouled by the young man’s sudden departure.
So much for a scenario that seems – suddenly – to have appeared, with God as Constantius, at the very beginning of human history, and that keeps lacing itself into and out of Kierkegaard’s works, .
B.
However, this footnote, and the first part of The Concept of Anguish, should also revive in the reader – or at least revives in the not so indefatigable writer of these lines – a memory of the very beginning of this thread. It was a post about Kant, from Kant’s lecture on Anthropology, which I threw in as a curve ball from the left field bleachers – and yes, I scatter my references like iron filings and hope to god that some magnet, some theme, will reveal the rose bloom in the field of force –in this case, the field that consists of the culture of happiness. I am operating with the biggest magnets.
Here, again, is the quotation from Kant.
“The question of whether Heaven and not been more provident in caring for us by providing us with everything so that we didn’t have to work is certainly to be answered no; from men demand activities (Geschaefte), even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, they would have done nothing but sat together and sung arcadian songs and observed the beauty of nature. Boredom would certainly have martyred them as well as it does other men in similar positions.”
C. The notes for the reply to Heiberg.
They always come in pairs. Sainte Beuve and Baudelaire. Heiberg and Kierkegaard. Wagner and Nietzsche. Goethe and Kleist. Snake eyes. One’s special, one’s irreplaceable misunderstander.
When JL Heiberg published his review of Repetition, Kierkegaard, naturally sharp-eyed about his own work, noticed that Heiberg most likely didn’t read past page 40 – oh, one gets sensitive about these things after you publish a bit, you read not simply with your eyes, but with your nervous system! – and that his remarks about repetition were almost heaven sent – the purest platitudinous fool’s gold from the bourgeois heart. As for instance in this passage:
“Repetition that is not mediated through subjectivity into something higher than itself is boring and devoid of spirit.” And this: “The author, who was merely seeking repetition, should not have repeated his journey to Berlin. On the other hand, the repetition of reading a book… can heighten and in a way surpass the first impression, because one thereby immerses oneself more deeply in the object and appropriates it more inwardly.” [From Soren Kierkegaard: Social and political philosophy, 92]
However, although Kierkegaard replied in his papers, he never published the reply in his lifetime. Luckily, the Hong translation of Repetition includes the whole lot.
I will fasten upon one passage.
First, one has to note that the entire reply is traversed by an irritation that amounts to the thought underneath the thought. It is not unimportant, this irritation – no, it is highly characteristic of the aliens to the happiness culture. That alienation is the result of a process – of a long discipline in creating in oneself a perpetually thinking sensitivity, something contrary to the long discipline in dulling the senses that is the circulation worker’s way of getting through the day. Kierkegaard was never a clerk, but he was the son of a man who started out as a clerk, and he has the soul of a clerk who casts everything off – who allows himself, like Bartleby, to experience time running out. Time running out is the special province of clerks.
Kierkegaard didn’t publish these notes, as I say, because … well, as any author knows, to go back and explain your text is to kill it and then offer yourself as the chief mourner at its wake. And the old rule applies: the corpse bleeds in the presence of the murderer. Similarly, the text leaks its meaning at the wake. All the parts, so carefully put together, begin to decompose. And yet – perhaps – this is the thought that strikes the author just as he begins to mourn– perhaps this is what it was built for! It is that thought which turns mourning into style, and a particular kind of style – feverish, hectic, crisis-ridden.
In any case, we will put that image aside and go to the passage, which begins:
“When applied in the sphere of individual freedom, the concept of repetition has a history – in as much as freedom passes through several stages in order to attain itself.” Heiberg, insisting on the dialectical, will get it.
The stages are three.
(a) “Freedom is first qualified as desire – being in desire. What it now fears is repetition, for it seems as though repetition has a magic power to keep freedom captive once it has tricked it into its power.”
This stage echoes Adam’s plight – yes, the Fall is behind it all, with erased Eve in train. When error, or sin, leaps into the world, it takes the form of desire. But of a particular desire – one that does not feel the spiky press of need in its back. Rather, it feels the press of no need at all in its back. In short, it feels the first intimations of boredom. This open up an entirely unexpected hole in the homogenous surface of whatever paradise (Divine or artificial) is at hand. In this sense, boredom and freedom are twins, conceived at the same time.
And need one be reminded of capitalist Europe, with its great Mordspiel of commodities and its new organization of labor into more and more specialized routines? Upon which the circulation laborer sits, endlessly billing.
The second stage, too, seems to point to the Adamic narrative. “b. Freedom qualified as sagacity. Repetition is assumed to exist, but freedom’s task in sagacity is to continually gain a new aspect of repetition. People who in freedom do not stand in any higher relation to the idea usually embellish this viewpoint as the highest wisdom.” Here, repetition takes us back to the experiment, and its strange links with temptation and seduction. Yet Kierkegaard had a strong desire to couple the sage with the buffoon – or to, at least, understand how the pair had so strangely gotten uncoupled. And remember, too, that the buffoon is linked, originally, in Moliere’s play, with Don Giovanni. Kierkegaard did not like the play, but he did understand I think that Don Juan is, by a process of transformations, present in Doctor Faust.
And this is enough for this post. I’ll put the second part up tonight.
…
“But since freedom qualified as sagacity is only finitely qualified, repetition must appear again, namely, repetition of the trickery by which sagacity wants to fool repetition and make it into something else. Sagacity despairs.”
The oppositional point of view, the alien in the artificial paradise, in as much as it accepts the mantle of the sage, has signed its concession already, made itself available for plug-n-play in the institution. When Kierkegaard constructs the series temptation-seduction-experiment, it finishes with the comedy routine, an exploding cigar, a bucket of paint thrown in the public’s face (as Ruskin said of Whistler), or the hectic style of… well, Constantine Constantius. And Edgar Allen Poe’s narrators, and DeQuincey’s Opium Addict. In modernity, the buffoonish decision to make comedy into a routine, to make irony into a repetition, is made in separation from the institutionalization of sagacity. While the dialogue between sage and buffoon which once constituted the two poles of philosophy has dissolved into two separate trajectories, still, each feels the call of the other. Each feels, somehow, the trivialization that attends their split destinies.
Bringing us to the third stage.
(c) “Now freedom breaks forth in its highest form, in which it is qualified in relation to itself. Here everything is reversed, and the very opposite of the first standpoint appears. Now freedom’s supreme interest is precisely to bring about repetition and its only fear is that variation would have the power to disturb its eternal nature. Here emerges the issue: is repetition possible? Freedom itself is now the repetition.”
And here – here, mark ye, our return to the Stoic reference we see later in Deleuze:
‘If it were the case that freedom in the individuality related to the surrounding world could be so immersed, so to speak, in the result that it cannot take itself back again (repeat itself), then everything is lost. Consequently, what freedom fears here is not repetition but variation; what it wants is not variation but repetition. If this will to repeat is stoicism, then it contradicts itself and thereby ends in destroying itself in order to affirm repetition in that way, which is the same as throwing a thing away in order to hide it more securely. When stoicism has stepped aside, only the religious movement remains as the true expression for repetition.”
Through a glass darkly, this is the credo of absolute reaction, thundering against the happiness culture and its awful inability to sacrifice. Underground channels connect our aliens. For surely there is, here, a formal similarity with the moment of revolution, stirring the old corpse that lay buried under bourgeois society, the revolution that made it, that old buried thing – which may not be a corpse at all, but an ardent tunneler, the old mole. Oddly, in the semiosphere of infinite variation, the driving motif is nostalgia for the freedom buried at your feet.
Well, this should end in an anecdote. Levin, Kierkegaard’s ‘secretary”, has given us a record of his last years. Levin evidently found Kierkegaard a trial, but – at the same time – a most moochable man. His memoir sounds like something out of Dostoevsky’s The Devils.
“Once I ate at his house every day for five weeks. Merely providing nourishment for his hungry spirit was also a source of unending bother. Every day we had soup, frightfully strong, then fish and a piece of melon, accompanied by a glass of fine sherry: then the coffee was brought in: two silver pots, two cream pitchers and a bag of sugar which was filled up every day. Then he opened a cupboard in which he had at least fifty sets of cups and saucers, but only one of each sort, and said, well, which cup and saucer do you want today?” It was of no consequence, but there was no way around it; I had to choose a set. When I said which one I would take, he asked, “Why?” One always had to explain why, and then at long last we would be finished and get our cups. (He also had an astonishing number of walking sticks).”
Levin, of course, knew where this was all leading to:
“He inherited the house and ninety-eight thousand rixdollars from his father. At his death nearly everything had been spent: he had gradually consumed his fortune.”
So many walking sticks! Such fine coffee! Mes gages! Mes gages!
A. the real paradise
In a footnote to the Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard references a theory propounded by F. Baader about the Fall – namely, that the Fall must be seen under the category of temptation. Baader is one of those German thinkers who toil up the back staircase to the Castle, unlike Hegel, and thus is praised for his “usual authority and vigor” – and yet here, Kierkegaard can’t go the extra step with him: “Baader seems to me to have neglected some intermediate elements. To pass from innocence to error by nothing other than the concept of temptation risks giving God, in his relation to man, almost the role of the experimenter, and in this way neglects the intermediary, psychological observation, for after all, the intermediary is concupiscentia.” [Translation from the French translation]
There is, here, an echo – a repetition interrupted. Kierkegaard’s scenario, again and again, consists of two men and one girl. The game is played in two moves, which are allotted to the two men: the first man observes the other man and woman – as Constantin Constantius observes the young man in Repetition. Eve is erased rather quickly in the Concept of Anguish – whereas, for Constantius, the young girl is a kind of “bait” for the young man. In the latter scenario, the young man “falls” for the young woman – in the scenario of the Fall, Adam falls, in a sense, for desire itself. The point for the experimenters is not to elicit a response from the girl, but from the man.
The second move in the game is allotted to the young man – or to Adam, although Adam does not write letters. The young man views the girl under two contrary impulses: to love her, or to flee from her – the latter being, indeed, the essence of the former. The young man in Repetition does not annul the girl – as Eve is erased in the story of the Fall – but he substitutes, for annuling her, fleeing from her. He does not, however, fall into Constantius’ experiment. Remember, Constantius proposes the course of fleeing her by deceiving her into thinking that he – the young man – is actually a libertine. Constantius even finds another girl – a working girl, of course, a shop girl, in a boutique – a milieu Kierkegaard must have known about. Indeed, his mother was, in a way, a shop girl. This erased Eve was supposed to be a decoy upon which the young lover was to – leave no mark. But Constantius’ plan was fouled by the young man’s sudden departure.
So much for a scenario that seems – suddenly – to have appeared, with God as Constantius, at the very beginning of human history, and that keeps lacing itself into and out of Kierkegaard’s works, .
B.
However, this footnote, and the first part of The Concept of Anguish, should also revive in the reader – or at least revives in the not so indefatigable writer of these lines – a memory of the very beginning of this thread. It was a post about Kant, from Kant’s lecture on Anthropology, which I threw in as a curve ball from the left field bleachers – and yes, I scatter my references like iron filings and hope to god that some magnet, some theme, will reveal the rose bloom in the field of force –in this case, the field that consists of the culture of happiness. I am operating with the biggest magnets.
Here, again, is the quotation from Kant.
“The question of whether Heaven and not been more provident in caring for us by providing us with everything so that we didn’t have to work is certainly to be answered no; from men demand activities (Geschaefte), even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, they would have done nothing but sat together and sung arcadian songs and observed the beauty of nature. Boredom would certainly have martyred them as well as it does other men in similar positions.”
C. The notes for the reply to Heiberg.
They always come in pairs. Sainte Beuve and Baudelaire. Heiberg and Kierkegaard. Wagner and Nietzsche. Goethe and Kleist. Snake eyes. One’s special, one’s irreplaceable misunderstander.
When JL Heiberg published his review of Repetition, Kierkegaard, naturally sharp-eyed about his own work, noticed that Heiberg most likely didn’t read past page 40 – oh, one gets sensitive about these things after you publish a bit, you read not simply with your eyes, but with your nervous system! – and that his remarks about repetition were almost heaven sent – the purest platitudinous fool’s gold from the bourgeois heart. As for instance in this passage:
“Repetition that is not mediated through subjectivity into something higher than itself is boring and devoid of spirit.” And this: “The author, who was merely seeking repetition, should not have repeated his journey to Berlin. On the other hand, the repetition of reading a book… can heighten and in a way surpass the first impression, because one thereby immerses oneself more deeply in the object and appropriates it more inwardly.” [From Soren Kierkegaard: Social and political philosophy, 92]
However, although Kierkegaard replied in his papers, he never published the reply in his lifetime. Luckily, the Hong translation of Repetition includes the whole lot.
I will fasten upon one passage.
First, one has to note that the entire reply is traversed by an irritation that amounts to the thought underneath the thought. It is not unimportant, this irritation – no, it is highly characteristic of the aliens to the happiness culture. That alienation is the result of a process – of a long discipline in creating in oneself a perpetually thinking sensitivity, something contrary to the long discipline in dulling the senses that is the circulation worker’s way of getting through the day. Kierkegaard was never a clerk, but he was the son of a man who started out as a clerk, and he has the soul of a clerk who casts everything off – who allows himself, like Bartleby, to experience time running out. Time running out is the special province of clerks.
Kierkegaard didn’t publish these notes, as I say, because … well, as any author knows, to go back and explain your text is to kill it and then offer yourself as the chief mourner at its wake. And the old rule applies: the corpse bleeds in the presence of the murderer. Similarly, the text leaks its meaning at the wake. All the parts, so carefully put together, begin to decompose. And yet – perhaps – this is the thought that strikes the author just as he begins to mourn– perhaps this is what it was built for! It is that thought which turns mourning into style, and a particular kind of style – feverish, hectic, crisis-ridden.
In any case, we will put that image aside and go to the passage, which begins:
“When applied in the sphere of individual freedom, the concept of repetition has a history – in as much as freedom passes through several stages in order to attain itself.” Heiberg, insisting on the dialectical, will get it.
The stages are three.
(a) “Freedom is first qualified as desire – being in desire. What it now fears is repetition, for it seems as though repetition has a magic power to keep freedom captive once it has tricked it into its power.”
This stage echoes Adam’s plight – yes, the Fall is behind it all, with erased Eve in train. When error, or sin, leaps into the world, it takes the form of desire. But of a particular desire – one that does not feel the spiky press of need in its back. Rather, it feels the press of no need at all in its back. In short, it feels the first intimations of boredom. This open up an entirely unexpected hole in the homogenous surface of whatever paradise (Divine or artificial) is at hand. In this sense, boredom and freedom are twins, conceived at the same time.
And need one be reminded of capitalist Europe, with its great Mordspiel of commodities and its new organization of labor into more and more specialized routines? Upon which the circulation laborer sits, endlessly billing.
The second stage, too, seems to point to the Adamic narrative. “b. Freedom qualified as sagacity. Repetition is assumed to exist, but freedom’s task in sagacity is to continually gain a new aspect of repetition. People who in freedom do not stand in any higher relation to the idea usually embellish this viewpoint as the highest wisdom.” Here, repetition takes us back to the experiment, and its strange links with temptation and seduction. Yet Kierkegaard had a strong desire to couple the sage with the buffoon – or to, at least, understand how the pair had so strangely gotten uncoupled. And remember, too, that the buffoon is linked, originally, in Moliere’s play, with Don Giovanni. Kierkegaard did not like the play, but he did understand I think that Don Juan is, by a process of transformations, present in Doctor Faust.
And this is enough for this post. I’ll put the second part up tonight.
…
“But since freedom qualified as sagacity is only finitely qualified, repetition must appear again, namely, repetition of the trickery by which sagacity wants to fool repetition and make it into something else. Sagacity despairs.”
The oppositional point of view, the alien in the artificial paradise, in as much as it accepts the mantle of the sage, has signed its concession already, made itself available for plug-n-play in the institution. When Kierkegaard constructs the series temptation-seduction-experiment, it finishes with the comedy routine, an exploding cigar, a bucket of paint thrown in the public’s face (as Ruskin said of Whistler), or the hectic style of… well, Constantine Constantius. And Edgar Allen Poe’s narrators, and DeQuincey’s Opium Addict. In modernity, the buffoonish decision to make comedy into a routine, to make irony into a repetition, is made in separation from the institutionalization of sagacity. While the dialogue between sage and buffoon which once constituted the two poles of philosophy has dissolved into two separate trajectories, still, each feels the call of the other. Each feels, somehow, the trivialization that attends their split destinies.
Bringing us to the third stage.
(c) “Now freedom breaks forth in its highest form, in which it is qualified in relation to itself. Here everything is reversed, and the very opposite of the first standpoint appears. Now freedom’s supreme interest is precisely to bring about repetition and its only fear is that variation would have the power to disturb its eternal nature. Here emerges the issue: is repetition possible? Freedom itself is now the repetition.”
And here – here, mark ye, our return to the Stoic reference we see later in Deleuze:
‘If it were the case that freedom in the individuality related to the surrounding world could be so immersed, so to speak, in the result that it cannot take itself back again (repeat itself), then everything is lost. Consequently, what freedom fears here is not repetition but variation; what it wants is not variation but repetition. If this will to repeat is stoicism, then it contradicts itself and thereby ends in destroying itself in order to affirm repetition in that way, which is the same as throwing a thing away in order to hide it more securely. When stoicism has stepped aside, only the religious movement remains as the true expression for repetition.”
Through a glass darkly, this is the credo of absolute reaction, thundering against the happiness culture and its awful inability to sacrifice. Underground channels connect our aliens. For surely there is, here, a formal similarity with the moment of revolution, stirring the old corpse that lay buried under bourgeois society, the revolution that made it, that old buried thing – which may not be a corpse at all, but an ardent tunneler, the old mole. Oddly, in the semiosphere of infinite variation, the driving motif is nostalgia for the freedom buried at your feet.
Well, this should end in an anecdote. Levin, Kierkegaard’s ‘secretary”, has given us a record of his last years. Levin evidently found Kierkegaard a trial, but – at the same time – a most moochable man. His memoir sounds like something out of Dostoevsky’s The Devils.
“Once I ate at his house every day for five weeks. Merely providing nourishment for his hungry spirit was also a source of unending bother. Every day we had soup, frightfully strong, then fish and a piece of melon, accompanied by a glass of fine sherry: then the coffee was brought in: two silver pots, two cream pitchers and a bag of sugar which was filled up every day. Then he opened a cupboard in which he had at least fifty sets of cups and saucers, but only one of each sort, and said, well, which cup and saucer do you want today?” It was of no consequence, but there was no way around it; I had to choose a set. When I said which one I would take, he asked, “Why?” One always had to explain why, and then at long last we would be finished and get our cups. (He also had an astonishing number of walking sticks).”
Levin, of course, knew where this was all leading to:
“He inherited the house and ninety-eight thousand rixdollars from his father. At his death nearly everything had been spent: he had gradually consumed his fortune.”
So many walking sticks! Such fine coffee! Mes gages! Mes gages!
Thursday, June 17, 2010
salle des crises
It was the stoics who first concerned themselves with the logical implication of the event – that is, they were concerned with the seeming disjunction between the realm of the quantitative and the qualitative, which were what they were left with after Aristotle’s syllogisms. The classical example is the heap of sand. There is no one grain of sand that ‘crowns’ the heap, – it does not emerge as a thing to be analyzed quantitatively, its structure opening up, its covering – dermis, hide - transparent, to our pullulating pluses and minuses.
Of course, these are the issues that became famous, again, in the eighties and nineties with chaos and then complexity theory. But the event is the secret rail that many a fumbling soul has squeezed in the dark, going up the back stairs in the Castle. Lichtenberg, somewhere, remarks that the proportion of the corpuscle of light to the eye was similar to the proportion between the Meditteranean and a leaf that has fallen into it – and just as the corpuscle contributes, in its infinite smallness, to the face of the beloved or to any of our visual images, the leaf, for all we know, may create a disturbance in the water that effects the waves coming in on the China coast. Once we have dispensed with the usual metrics of the quantitative, we’ve entered a realm in which what is small and what is large, judged by effect, can’t be predetermined by our biases. We must wipe the impressions on the slate of the mind clean.
Deleuze’s chapter on the problematic begins with the stoic theme of the event – the ideal event. Deleuze, from the beginning, had been influenced by Emile Bréhier’s reconstruction of stoic logic, from which he drew upon to sketch out the nature of the event, one of the great themes in the whole of Deleuze’s work. He is drawn to events like addiction, schizophrenia, revolution – events in which the perspectives given us by addition and subtraction are unsatisfactory, insufficient, and morally degrading.
The event, then, for Deleuze consists of singularities that escape the domain of the quantitative – and yet have a distinct insistence in the world. These he calls ‘singularities”. He quotes Peguy about singularities in history – crises, critical points – and nears, in his language, the kind of talk that the complexity school, in the eighties, adopted as their own:
Péguy saw profoundly that history and the event were inseparable from such and such singular points: “there are critical points of the event as there are critical points of temperature, points of fusion, of congealing, of boiling, of condensation; of coagulation, of crystallization; and there are even, in the event, those states of superfusion that do not precipitate out, which don’t crystallize, which are only determined by the introduction of a fragment of the future event…” And Péguy knew how to invent an entire language, among the most pathological and aesthetic that one could dream of, for telling how a singularity is prolonged in a line of ordinary points, but also takes itself up into another singularity, redistributes itself in another set (the two repetitions, the bad and the good, that which enchains and that which saves).”
I should point out, here, that crisis was not only a term of art in early modern medicine, but – among the Mesmerists – became the supreme event, the moment when the cure of animal magnetism produced its convulsive or deranging effects on the body of the patient. Though I have yet to find any commenter remark upon the connection between Kierkegaard’s use of ‘experiment’, and its connection with seduction and temptation (which I will try to get back to later), there is a certain invisible ink, here. I smell it. I taste it. I am a great licker of pages. Crisis, is, of course, one of the great Kierkegaardian terms.
To return to Deleuze – while other philosophers have clung to the secret rail, Deleuze – and this is the thrill of reading him – seems to switch on a light. One that nobody has bothered to switch on before. In the midst of a sometimes puzzling language, taken from anywhere – having no problem with mismatching vernaculars if that is what it takes – Deleuze explains the seemingly chaotic nature of the event by putting it, ideally, under the reign of another temporal order – Aion. It is in that order that the problematic comes out of its shell, so to speak – no longer is it a subjective difficulty, but it is the horizon of the event itself.
And here I will pause for a yawning parenthesis, to write something about Repetition and freedom for the next post.
Of course, these are the issues that became famous, again, in the eighties and nineties with chaos and then complexity theory. But the event is the secret rail that many a fumbling soul has squeezed in the dark, going up the back stairs in the Castle. Lichtenberg, somewhere, remarks that the proportion of the corpuscle of light to the eye was similar to the proportion between the Meditteranean and a leaf that has fallen into it – and just as the corpuscle contributes, in its infinite smallness, to the face of the beloved or to any of our visual images, the leaf, for all we know, may create a disturbance in the water that effects the waves coming in on the China coast. Once we have dispensed with the usual metrics of the quantitative, we’ve entered a realm in which what is small and what is large, judged by effect, can’t be predetermined by our biases. We must wipe the impressions on the slate of the mind clean.
Deleuze’s chapter on the problematic begins with the stoic theme of the event – the ideal event. Deleuze, from the beginning, had been influenced by Emile Bréhier’s reconstruction of stoic logic, from which he drew upon to sketch out the nature of the event, one of the great themes in the whole of Deleuze’s work. He is drawn to events like addiction, schizophrenia, revolution – events in which the perspectives given us by addition and subtraction are unsatisfactory, insufficient, and morally degrading.
The event, then, for Deleuze consists of singularities that escape the domain of the quantitative – and yet have a distinct insistence in the world. These he calls ‘singularities”. He quotes Peguy about singularities in history – crises, critical points – and nears, in his language, the kind of talk that the complexity school, in the eighties, adopted as their own:
Péguy saw profoundly that history and the event were inseparable from such and such singular points: “there are critical points of the event as there are critical points of temperature, points of fusion, of congealing, of boiling, of condensation; of coagulation, of crystallization; and there are even, in the event, those states of superfusion that do not precipitate out, which don’t crystallize, which are only determined by the introduction of a fragment of the future event…” And Péguy knew how to invent an entire language, among the most pathological and aesthetic that one could dream of, for telling how a singularity is prolonged in a line of ordinary points, but also takes itself up into another singularity, redistributes itself in another set (the two repetitions, the bad and the good, that which enchains and that which saves).”
I should point out, here, that crisis was not only a term of art in early modern medicine, but – among the Mesmerists – became the supreme event, the moment when the cure of animal magnetism produced its convulsive or deranging effects on the body of the patient. Though I have yet to find any commenter remark upon the connection between Kierkegaard’s use of ‘experiment’, and its connection with seduction and temptation (which I will try to get back to later), there is a certain invisible ink, here. I smell it. I taste it. I am a great licker of pages. Crisis, is, of course, one of the great Kierkegaardian terms.
To return to Deleuze – while other philosophers have clung to the secret rail, Deleuze – and this is the thrill of reading him – seems to switch on a light. One that nobody has bothered to switch on before. In the midst of a sometimes puzzling language, taken from anywhere – having no problem with mismatching vernaculars if that is what it takes – Deleuze explains the seemingly chaotic nature of the event by putting it, ideally, under the reign of another temporal order – Aion. It is in that order that the problematic comes out of its shell, so to speak – no longer is it a subjective difficulty, but it is the horizon of the event itself.
And here I will pause for a yawning parenthesis, to write something about Repetition and freedom for the next post.
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