The proceeding text was inspired by the cursory reading of Maxa Otto's (It is not certain if she exists fully in reality or in fiction) essay "On Relating: Thoughts on Psychoanalysis, Speaking, Madness and Hope." In the course of our discussion by email I kept asking myself if I was experiencing a kind of blindness, a kind of unreflected space, in even having a discussion at all outside of the institutional/institutionalizing boundaries of academia or my own service practice as a clinician. What are the blindnesses of enjoying a simple discussion, a walk through the garden of images with an intellectual acquaintance? This essay is an attempt to relate to blindness. "Relating" is "...not relating."
Language has always been my guard. I wanted to comment on her essay by making a suggestion: how much do we really see? I do not profess to have taken enough time to have read her essay with the depth that would be necessary to speak on it. I chose rather to draw my experience from what I was experiencing in the moment: to discuss at depth the unreflected elements that are held in the shadows of any relationship, any surface glimmer or glint reflecting.
I would say this: My theoretical approach at this time is as follows:
- psychoanalytical approaches are "ontic" in the Heideggerian sense of the word: and all discourse on "relating" in an innocent manner is tainted by the general political, ontic cynicism of mass consumerism (particularly the consumerism of mental health).
- I remonstrate academia and academics, even though frequently I write like I am an academic: So I talk for a while until I cannot stand myself any longer as an intellectual... and then I retreat (as in this essay) into my juvenile critique of Sartre, to the rambling incoherence of my essay, its free association, its lack of proper textual substantiation: all this sends me to hell in the academic sense.
- Let me make this clear: I ramble because at this time I do not believe that academic "coherence" would really be in service to the soul: rather it is the abomination of the soul. The result reads like a combination of a passage of Lacan and the script to The Big Lebowski (Cohen Brothers, 1998): a combination of obscenity: willfully incorrect, willfully inappropriate, willfully wrong, willfully adolescent, willfully unmeditated, willfully unreflected (not unlike Derrida's Tain of the Mirror) : because academia is so dried up and rarified that it has just about died and gone to hell. If we have any hope, and I use that word "hope" only bitterly, knowing that the devil guards its every gesture, then it will not come from our ultimately "Christian" scholarly approach to education
- I revile most forms of "American Academia" as expressions of politically correct consumerism. In other words "un-thought" "un-reflection" or even "anti-reflection" I am fairly certain that they would probably say "Well, good riddance to you too!"
- I am inspired (Oppermann might say a little too much) by Derrida, Deleuze, and Jean-Luc Nancy, If I must pick my favorite names. I am inspired by my friend Oppermann, and I hope he will comment a little more on this other than to suggest that my writing sounds merely befuddled, fogged, overly prolific/productive in an age of horrid mindless technological production.
- This discourse also reminds me of the struggles I underwent when I dealt with a former professor, Yifat Hachamovich. Yifat was brilliant to the highest degree, and inspired significant moments of thought, which shone out of my experience of college in the late 1980's.
- At this time I was impressed with some of what Maxa Otto had presented in her work: we were discussing some similar terms: "self," "other," "language," and to boot there was some association to the phenomenological approach to study (She: Merleau-Ponty, I: Heidegger and his descendants in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy). I do find myself drawing to different conclusions: generally ones that favor the prison of un-relatedness, a place where there is no "other," perhaps the abyss of existing itself, rather than any "foundation" even if it is "relation" or the "Other." And these conclusions are terrible, horrible in many senses: but somehow I prefer their intellectual burden as a pain of guardianship of my own thought, free from appropriation of myself, or free from the appropriation of any other in the micro-fascism of pretending to "know" "relatedness."
(Between the shroud's of parentheses: The image of Magritte's "Lovers," a non-conjunction, came to me first from a Colorado College "symposium on intimacy." I do not think I actually attended any of the exhibitions or lectures, I was too angry to go to this sort of thing. However I pasted a multiple reduplication of this image on my dormitory room door, covering the door with the op-art deconstruction of surrealism: the insectile bug's eye view of technology, mass production, and the promise of infinite infantile gratification high fidelity reduplication, immediate satisfaction that is endlessly replicable... as seen on TV.)
This article is offered to all readers, and in this way I relate to you all, without privilege, with only the censorship that would lead to obscenity: relating in its essence is relating to "one" (molecule) finite particularity. This relating to the finite singular is about the development of a critical mass in the atomic shining of the technological-nuclear age. We will NOT do this in this article. This article will be about relating, but it will not relate, rather I will mediate relationship in the technological media which promises instantaneous gratification: the web log. In this manner we believe, but only in the most literal or "real" sense that a communication has been actually granted, that the message read was fully "related" to the one who is supposed to hear. So I will not relate, because in order to truly relate it would cost everything, it would cast me down in my own shame, my own broken-ness for that meaning finally to get through. I would be made "abject," cannot be made that just yet. So it would cost "everything" (I have always had a flair for hysterical drama, to paraphrase a Walser or perhaps Henry Darger) to relate, at least all of my attention, and right now I am directing my attention to you all here: being finite, futural: for them who shall be about to read...
tele-
DEFINITION: To lift, support, weigh; with derivatives referring to measured weights and thence to money and payment. Oldest form *tel2-.
Derivatives include tolerate, retaliate, tantalize, Atlas, translate, and extol.
1. Suffixed form *tel-mon-. telamon, from Greek telamn, supporter, bearer. 2. Suffixed form *tel()-es-. a. toll1; philately, from Greek telos, tax, charge; b. tolerate, from Latin tolerre, to bear, endure. 3. Suffixed zero-grade form *t-i-. talion; retaliate, from Latin tli, reciprocal punishment in kind, possibly “something paid out,” from *tali- (influenced by tlis, such). 4. Suffixed variant zero-grade form *tala-nt-. talent, from Greek talanton, balance, weight, any of several specific weights of gold or silver, hence the sum of money represented by such a weight. 5. Perhaps (but unlikely) intensive reduplicated form *tantal-. tantalize, Tantalus, from Greek Tantalos, name of a legendary king, “the sufferer.” 6. Perhaps (but unlikely) zero-grade form *t-. Atlantic, Atlas, from Greek Atls (stem Atlant-), name of the Titan supporting the world. 7. Suffixed zero-grade form *t-to-. ablation, ablative, allative, collate, dilatory, elate, elative, illation, illative, legislator, oblate1, prelate, prolate, relate, sublate, superlative, translate, from Latin ltus, “carried, borne,” used as the suppletive past participle of ferre, to bear (see bher-1), with its compounds. 8. Suffixed zero-grade form *t--. tola, from Sanskrit tul, scales, balance, weight. 9. Nasalized zero-grade form *t-n--. extol, from Latin tollere, to lift. (Pokorny 1. tel- 1060.)
And so to relate means to lift or to bear. And the bearing always takes care of the weight, the weight is it's care and it's charge. To relate... technologically? -Imagine, if you will, a forklift carrying a load of concrete blocks: it is relating. But the fabric in the technological world is only laid bare, like the laying bear of these concrete blocks themselves: bare concrete: a lime mixture: concrete: technological relation.
Concrete is a construction material composed of
cement (commonly
Portland cement) as well as other cementitious materials such as
fly ash and
slag cement,
aggregate (generally a coarse aggregate such as
gravel limestone or granite, plus a fine aggregate such as
sand and
water) and chemical admixtures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete
Relating in the barest sense to the concrete
Source: http://www.ttt-services.co.uk/truck_history.htm
is also a book written by Thomas Bernhard: it is once again as heartbreaking as existence can be, so completely frustrated and so beautiful, and we ask what did Thomas Bernhard relate by virtue of this small mean character caught in the cage of his own neurosis and morbid preoccupations?
"Instead of the book he's meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, a dark and grotesquely funny story of small woes writ large and profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction"
http://books.google.com/books?id=PLluAwAACAAJ&dq=thomas+bernhard+concrete&source=gbs_book_other_versions_r&cad=1_2
Here is Bernhard's precise line: precisely where he becomes in his very essence the very concrete that seems to encase every possible living activity of his soul:
"We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task!"
That's it. That is all we need to say, the rest would be the same: the page in Becket's language is a page just like any other page and the day just like any other day: objectivity, scientific realization of the zenith of human production: will require that we must be free from all human contact: even if we are speaking of the science of rendering the life of an artist like Mendelssohn Bartoldy in it's exact detail, or Oppermann's life in its exact detail, as I have tried to do elsewhere: this is the concrete fact: that in order to fully render a life, one must enter into an abomination: a monstrous condition of full un-relation, and un-reflection.
What did Bernhard Relate by this book, by his singular and circular purpose, which was not to relate at all: not to relate honestly, not to relate as Thomas Bernhard himself, but as this frustrated intellectual character, this mean little puppet, harshly lit on the intellectual stage, like some expressionist dummy (not quite an "idiot")? Was Bernhard somehow making fun of me now, in my refusal to relate: that i play the academician only makes me somehow smaller: by virtue of the fact that I will not embrace the particular form of what it is to truly relate: I remain technological?
Technology relates to no one. Die Niemandsrose, this is the technological twilight (Dämmerung): not dark yet, but it sure is getting there: "Rose de Person" to paraphrase Paul Celan's poem: This in Derrida: "
Sovereignties in question: the poetics of Paul Celan"
Derrida : cette image destrué n'est pas une écriture de Celan
Here Derrida points to the "risk" or the venture of writing at all. He is all risk, that Derrida, that gambler! But the "risk" he points too is still enshrouded with too much derridean verbiage and lacks the gravity of soul-speaking: a gravity that always threatens a violence of taking itself literally, always the threat in "soul" of remaming it "blood and soil" which is alright were it not for the burden of dealing with the Jew, who sees through the cynnical nature of all power, leaders and messiahs. This Derrida, this Jew, he is in this instance nothing more than the garish gambler holding a cigar in one hand and aces backed with eights in the other: a "dead man's hand." And yet for the text itself he holds out, and this much I will salute and love him for: the heart of Derrida, the great and breaking man's heart, what was never spoken and so deserves to lift and carry, relating the essence of "the unreflected."
But as any gambler knows in a game of roulette that the game is up once the ball falls into place: it is the sound of the ball circling that matters: and this circling and re-circling is the game. To gamble, with shit/money, well that is all tasteless crap. To gamble with one's life: well that is for heroes and, after all is said, "what's a hero?" Or shall we say that "what?" is the hero, accompanied by his side-kick, "huh?" !
The hero is deadly serious, somewhere he has to take things literally: wrestling with harsh reality. The clown is not serious, and as a fool always questions the established sovereign and power: the jester: and in this sense is preferable as the one who does not take seriousness seriously. But the jester ill dignified makes fun of people in the midst of their misfortune. There are then two forms of fool or jester questioning sovereignty: one questions the violence of the ordering principle, the other obfuscates and denies, selectively re-writes history to deny genocide. There is a place for clowning and there is a place where one can no longer clown without becoming obscene in the highest degree: the capacity for evil laughs in the face of suffering.
But Derrida (ever the flare for the tragic) also points to the ashes, and the ash of all things that abide or endure (Morenius). In fact, the text is insistent, the fragment here begins and ends with the image of "ash," an homage to the dust of Hades himself, but always carried with the sacred element of the most profound grief. Ash with these ashes is not the dust of money, which retains the essence of its potential energy, somehow degraded by cowardice. The ash of Derrida is the ash of courage: literally taking heart. Ash, crestfallen, unable to overleap itself, its own nothingness: the ashes remain behind, obdurate, stuck, perhaps placed within the cement mixture of concrete. The Ash is the tragic component of the poem, born of the slaughter that is no sacrifice: Shoah. This ash sinks to the bottom of the pond, and comprises the muck at its depth, on the surface: reflection still takes place: of "human temperament" and of daylight, breathable air. Reflection (bent back flux) can only reflect some of the way, it is a surface event. The calcined ash sinks to the bottom in dull sodden silent presence, the presence of water, which is both surface and depth: the Thalean/Deleuzian logic of sense.
Still, we are too far along the dialectic to ponder the question of "what" or hunh?" when confronted by the problem of writing an essay on "relating." Heidegger asks Celan, when he gives to Celan the book after this name: "Jah, aber was heist Denken?" -I am sorry, Martin, but the question is beside the point. The question was made irrelevant in this frame of ash (even though, somehow, later, he too, indeed even Heidegger gathers too in the logos of grief): it is neither "what" nor "hunh," elementary gunslingers (Quixote and Sancho Panza, the end of naive medieval romanticism), none of this matters, none of this even seems to happen!
To What? A Hero?
The source for this image is:
http://grillomation.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html
I particularly adore the grimy, dirtiness of these heraldic questions, dirty greasy questions: "what calls for thinking?" and his sidekick "Hunh?" here we begin the lengthy discourse on heroes, and a holding forth on how they are fucked: The Big Lebowski: The comedy of Heidegger's question:
"I only mention it because sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? Sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here - the Dude from Los Angeles. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude. The Dude, from Los Angeles. And even if he's a lazy man - and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide. Sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes
The essence of Heidegger's question is in this sense a tasteless joke, at best gallows humor, and he deserves to be raked over the coals for this. Comedy in this sense is a degradation of the "noble" tragic spirit? Comedy is infernal comedy, as if you can trust to all of Hitler's noble paladins the sacred cause of seeking the Truth of Being. These paladins are all based on genocidal cynicism, the de-per-mission of the reflected world, and the reflection that always questions sovereignty and power is the reflection of the Jew.
All these questions, all of Heidegger's questions (much as they point to the noble, refined spirit are not capable of seeing through his "Unfall") are not the question, because they fail to be actually relating to anything at all, aside from their own greasiness and even then it is uncertain. The point was that to relate would be to relate to the particular: to venture everything, and to lose everything (ashes!), or to gain everything, and not just money.
And that then WOULD be the blessing. That would be the blessing indeed, to speak as if one could speak, in bearing forth the intimacy of the particular: in reaching the critical mass of relatedness, of carrying on a chain reaction, of dealing with radio-active poison, residue, because every experience we know of, no matter how much energy it produces, also produces shit and poison that we must once again, kindly beseachingly turn to mother earth and begging her, say: please take this from us: please take all this technological shit! Please do something with it! Please change it back again into the brightness of the wilderness, alive, savage, dangerous, indifferent, untamed, yes, but somehow healthier than the technological toxins we place in the system to this day.
Ja, aber warum habe ich mich solch ein Schreiben aufgenommen? Was I worn out, terrorized? Struck? ...by some kind of lightning about some kind of terrible intensity within myself and had to write it as such: the terrible futural part of me that has yet to be mirrored, has never been seen, and has only the vague possibility that it has yet to be written?
Gelobt seist du, Niemand.
Dir zulieb wollen
wir bluhn.
Dir
entgegen.
And with this Celan puts to death the sacrificeable: as if we could sacrifice to another! "That is all bad faith!" Isn't what this amounts to? Sartre isn't worth a God damned penny! Not even a God damned fart! And that is because he is a philosopher of "subject" and "responsibility" and fucking "secular humanism," whatever that is! Fuck Sartre!
Jean-Paul Sartre and the physiognomy of fucked-ness:
the western "intellectual" subject,
and with whom I share relationship
through the humiliation of my own obscenity:
A Twenty-First century Dude in Los Angeles
with the bureaucracy of this French thought.
Sartre, aligned too easily with the question, but not questioning deep enough? Susceptible to cynicism: complicit or resistant?
Sartre offers us purvue of the cynic before the "subject," the chilling phrase of the shadow that protects the vulnerable anima of the situation: "someone is going to be fucked." And with this there is also a transparency, a seeing "through," and a return to ... a rythm that is without hope? Barely living and barely alive?
To put to death the sacrificeable is actually to end its possibility that it might be a sacrifice: it is a sacrifice that is really to no one and no-thing. But who am I really to end with such a dry place, a bunch of academic prose and a poor tin cup, draining the very dregs of this relating: to what? A hero? The Unreflected?
Sam Beckett: Texts for Nothing (4):
"its the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative, I exist in the pit of my inexistence, of his, of ours, there's the simple answer. It's not with thinking he will find me, but what is he to do, living and bewildered, yes, living, say what he may. Forget me, know me not, yes, that would be the wisest, none better able than he."
In the endless technological twilight, where cynicism has reached its highest capitulation in the technological totalization of humanity: the cynnical appropriation of any sacrifice renders it useless, only as dead meat:
"The effacement of sacrifice, the effacement of communion, the effacement of the West: this doesn't mean that the West could be reduced to what came before it, or that Western sacrifice could be reduced to the rites that it was supposed to have spiritualized. Rather, it means that we are on the verge of another community, another methexis, one in which the mimesis of sharing would efface the sacrificial mimicry of an appropriation of the Other." (Jean Luc Nancy, "The Unsacrificeable" from his book A Finite Thinking, p. 77)
Here the action of Jean-Luc Nancy is to negate, deny, explode, implode, efface (as the name of Amelech is effaced) the act of "sacrifice," which always was held in the hands of priest-messiahs, who always violently asserted their power as the sacred. The act of "sacrifice" is a sovereignty in question for Jean-Luc Nancy. The legitimacy of power is the problem (psychologically speaking the root of the liberative/condemning Western Animus, the "father complex" spoken of in Hillman's Blue Fire), and we must go back to the pre-metaphysical "sharing" that is before the conception of power: neither the violence that is hidden behind the order/cosmos of the nomos basileus, nor is it that of the jester who questions power at every turn. There would then cease to be question because there would cease to be appropriation and cease to be a shadow to appropriation. We would become the flatness of the horizon, which has no shadow: but above and below which we would behold the rise and fall of the heavens.
But here there is a dogged determinism to stand in some verticality toward horizontal breadth, the extension of our lives: thus to cast the shadow of order: it's inherent violence: to bear the consequence, the restitution; asking if there may be some other shadow, un-reflected and beyond the parable (Gleichnis) of humanity, the depth of depth itself that would stand to meet me in this sharing... and I would melt, crumble, seeking truth through the fault-lines, my mountain broken, effortlessly shattering into a million shining rivers, reflecting ("only") sunlight, sinking into the great and uncanny sea.
