THE CALL (2004/07)
"DARKER WITH THE DAY"
THE PREAMBLE / THE KNOT / THE CHASE
PRECIS - The following module (auto-tutorial) is a type of survey of the conceptual cipher of the Sublime, as it is deployed today, as both a sign of a possible-impossible Way Out of post-modern nihilism, and as it is often (also) used and abused as a means of frightening anyone so disposed to listen to its call. That said, this 'call' calls today for very specific reasons, as detailed below, in both the works of certain neo-Marxist theoreticians (mostly the Lacanian neo-Marxists) and nominally non-aligned aspects of recent radical phenomenological analyses and the perhaps parallel agenda of radical empiricism, although the latter seems primarily an embrace of post-modern nihilism versus a so-called Way Out. This Way Out is also the Way Out that has been misused and appropriated time and again for all the wrong reasons, typically leading straight back toward the loading of empty signifiers and the deployment of new totalizing systems. Today, as in the past, the Great Game (the chase and the hunt), which usually occurs in language first, is a search for the seemingly archaic essence of the Sublime; an essence that only appears to be archaic in the sense that it is also the perennial radical gesture par excellence. Herein the conceptual cipher of the Sublime is also presented as the figure of infinity doubled (the doubled figure eight). This gesture opens both forward- and backward-leaning trajectories toward Pascal, on one hand, and Hegel (and Hegel's concept of Synthesis) on the other. If anything, the Sublime resides in the conceptual voids of all rhetorical hunts, and, as such, it is (as Jean-Luc Marion has shown) unnameable. (07/18/04)
"Inside I sat, seeking the presence of a God
I searched through the pictures in a leather-bound book
I found a woolly lamb dozing in an issue of blood
And a gilled Jesus shivering on a fisherman’s hook"
--Nick Cave, "Darker with the Day" (Mute Song, 2001)
PERAMBULATING PREAMBLE
"Babe / It seems so long / Since you went away / And I / Just got to say / That it grows darker with the day." Two songs on Nick Cave’s 2001 release No More Shall We Part are virtual odes to the Sublime: 1/ "Sweetheart, Come"; and 2/ "Darker with the Day". The latter (as above) is, indeed, the darkest. The former is a plaintive cry: "Walk with me under the stars / For it’s a clear and easy pleasure / And be happy in my company / For I love you without measure". Yet both are sublime love songs.
These lyrics are poetic proof, if that were necessary, that there is always something to be wary of, something always moving in certain aesthetic systems to beware. This something is proto-fascism (crypto-fascism). From Mazzoni to D’Annunzio to Heidegger runs the threat, even if Heidegger merely donned fascism to become Rector of Freiburg University. Or, in the alternative nothingness (nihilism) noted in Susan Sontag’s 1967 essay on Minimalism, "The Aesthetics of Silence" (Aspen 5/6), the threat is pietistic silence, self-destruction, abject formalism, or whatever suits the purpose of vacating the premises of spent systems. Sontag mentions Kleist’s suicide, Hölderlin’s madness, and Nietzsche’s self-destruction. Deleuze’s jumping from his very own formalistic window on the world seems straight out of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: "Better to break the window and leap ..." (Yet dialectical materialists will always point out that Hölderlin suffered from schizophrenia and Nietzsche from tertiary syphilis. Conversely, asymmetrical blame games exist for making the French Revolution the fault of Jesuits, south-German, Swabian Illuminati and/or godless Freemasons, while Napoleon has been blamed on Romanticism and Nietzsche is the patron saint of Nazism.) Questions remain, to this day (reloaded most recently by Richard Rorty) as to how a right-wing German philological-phenomenological project such as Heidegger's 'house of language' could be absorbed into a left-wing French structuralist and post-structuralist critique of culture.
And then there was Helmut Newton crashing his cadillac into a wall on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, leaving the Chateau Marmont on January 15, 2004, the anniversary of Dali’s death, and killing himself in the process. Close friend of Dali and master of the photographic, voyeuristic sublime, Newton answered the call in his own inimitable tragic way -- by staging an accident -- shortly after donating his entire photographic archive to the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin. This is all quite apropos of the implicit ideologies of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic (detailed by Terry Eagleton and Hal Foster), and the eventual outcome of the ultimate confrontation with the Sublime, the Self visited upon Itself.
THE TANGLED KNOT
Regarding this topological (typological?) knot, Sontag reminds us (not for naught) that Rimbaud turned to slave trading in Abyssinia, a very different saison en enfer for the author of the sensational "Alchimie du verbe". Klossowski’s post-Surrealist, pre-Existentialist turn in the echoing silences of a Dominican order (and the subsequent Sadean turn) seem similarly disposed. It is not difficult to find innumerable souls up against the wall, not finding the missing ‘any’ (Morelli’s ‘any’), the proverbial gap in things, through which to escape everything else -- all totalizing systems. History is littered with the debris of individuals answering the call of the Sublime, yet responding with forged documents; that is to say, individuals hearing the call of the sublime 'nothing' -- Freedom and Love -- and providing the opposite.
In the gnostic system the ‘World’ (Lacan’s Symbolic?) is ruled by the demi-urge. This image, made most potent in Blake’s Ancient of Days, is a dybbuk, a phantom. It is the phantasmatic outline of all ideologies in the extended field of representation, compass in hand. For Lacan and Derrida this outline is the place held in all systems (vertically or horizontally arrayed) for the Names-of-the-Father, the absent Father. The confrontation with this phantasm, which is also the ego, is the last confrontation en route to the call of the Sublime. It is the last test before crossing into this parallel world. For the Buddha, the last temptation was ‘Heaven’. For Kazantzakis’ Christ it was a normal life with wife and children.
For the Russian Formalists, before swerving off into Soviet ideology (and until Socialist Realism came along), the last temptation was to seek presence for the absence they so brilliantly foretold. Many were sent off to prison for the favor. Thus the Nature-Culture divide is ‘bridged’ by ideologies left, right, and center because it is an unstable thing. Dialectics can not resolve this rupture in things. It is the exquisite and mysterious ‘nature’ within the seemingly archaic discours naturel, yet discernible as metaphysics since Pascal, that carries within it the antidote. As antidote, this natural language slips in and out of discourse (discourses). It was sought (and lost) in Vienna, at Cacciari’s so-called Turning Point c.1900. It was lost and found and lost again within all of the various movements within art and aesthetics throughout the 20th century. That it calls now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is of sublime significance, yet the dangers of it being misrepresented are as potent today as any time past.
Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s late neo-conservatism (after the French Revolution) is a minor affair compared with the 20th-century manifestations of the failure of nerve before the sublime call. Goethe’s regressions, after Sturm und Drang, are insignificant when placed next to the evisceration of natural language underway these past decades within post-modern nihilism. Answering the call by re-loading ideology is as appalling as answering the call with empty, formalistic language games. Hence, then, the necessity of a synchronic, Benjaminian deconstruction and the endless demolition project of modernity anyway, modernity as eternal now, in the face of reaction and -- potentially -- much, much worse.
"The burdens that you carry nowAre not of your creation
So let’s not weep for their evil deeds
But for their lack of imagination
Today’s the time for courage, babe
Tomorrow can be for forgiving
And if he touches you again with his stupid hands
His life won’t be worth living
Sweetheart, come
Sweetheart, come
Sweetheart, come to me"
--Nick Cave, "Sweetheart, Come" (2001)
GK (07/04/04)
The RTF was deleted 08/20/05 / An 'edited' version of this essay (minus the Nick Cave lyrics and postscripts) appeared in The Old Town Review (September 2004) / And then (mais oui!) there was Blanchot, flirting with the far Right (in the 1930s) but, later (in the 1960s), depositing the remains of himself on the Left ... See, "Kant Nietzsche Undo Lacan", cliquez ici (HTML / RTF) ...
POSTSCR(Y)PTS ('DIG FOR VICTORY')
THE NEO-MARXIST SUBLIME (IF, AND, OR) - And, as Alain Badiou points out in various places (but most especially in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 1993), present-day Capitalism Triumphant implies (endlessly) that all other possible political-economic systems represent the ‘abyss’. Such neo-liberal (neo-imperial) scare tactics typically portrayed the vanquished, twin monsters of 20th-century Facism and Communism (explicit totalitarianisms) as ‘the enemy’, whereas of late the game has shifted to ‘the War on Terrorism’. Yet, according to Badiou, "We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian -- where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone -- is presented to us as ideal." Badiou’s quest for his very own version of the Sublime, albeit a neo-Marxist Sublime (in concert with his cohort Slavoj Zizek), is essentially a quixotic ‘hunt’ for universal Truths; "For complex reasons, I give the Good the name ‘Truths’ (in the plural). A Truth is a concrete process that starts by an upheaval (an encounter, a general revolt, a surprising new invention), and develops as fidelity to the novelty thus experimented. A Truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal." Thus, Badiou (leader of a "Maoist sect" in the 1970s) dissects the "liberal-democratic" portrayal of the two-headed beast, Fascism and Communism, and finds political-ontological différance -- that is, he exposes the eliding of structural and ideological divergences within what Capitalism would project as the two-faced "face of evil". "First, liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. Second, the Communist revolutions of the 20th century have represented grandiose efforts to create a completely different historical and political universe. Politics is not the management of the power of the State. Politics is first the invention and the exercise of an absolutely new and concrete reality. Politics is the creation of thought. The Lenin who wrote What is to be Done?, the Trotsky who wrote History of the Russian Revolution, and the Mao Zedong who wrote On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People are intellectual geniuses, comparable to Freud or Einstein." It is the anti-sublime hypocrisy (abject nihilism) of the neo-Capitalist beast that Badiou finds most appalling, today. / All citations (above) from Christoph Cox, Molly Whalen, "On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou", Cabinet 5 (Winter 2001), pp. 69-74 / See also, Sublime Zizek: Guarding Lenin’s Tomb (CounterPunch) and Zizek / Badiou (Samizdat) / Regarding the embrace of nihilism, versus reloading anything resembling utopian projects (vis-à-vis modernist architecture), see Manfredo Tafuri is Dead (Samizdat) / And, mutatis mutandis, it is (after all) the post-modern Sublime (played out within the circling, swirling pages of post-structuralist exegesis ‘here’ and ‘there’) that restored (refined and redefined) the putative ‘post-metaphysical’ coordinates for the present-day version of ‘The Call’. (07/15/04)
THE CHIASMUS & THE WAY OUT - Regarding ‘Iceland’ as a possible-impossible ‘site’ for the premiation of a type of sonic sublime within so-called ‘trip-pop’ music (that is to say, the Sublime re-relocated and/or re-banished to high-romantic ‘waste-places’), see (hear) the music and music videos of Bjork, Emiliana Torrini, and Sigur Ros ... See especially Floria Sigismondi's delirious digital work for Sigur Ros. In cinema proper, see Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing (2001), most of which was set in Iceland. / Elsewhere: In cyberspace (or ‘Denmark’), see Netochka Nezvanova @ m9ndfukc.com ... / Needless to say, there are innumerable analogues for this ‘evacuation’ of the cultural coordinates of the Sublime in various arts and letters -- most especially Belles-Lettres and Cinema (Kino) -- and quite evocatively within what passes as ‘world music’, music marketed by the neo-capitalist machine as ‘the voice of the Other’ ... The ‘Other’, a conceptual sign associated with post-structuralist and post-colonial criticism, is also (and notably) considered an empty and abstract (morally, ethically bankrupt) concept by voices as diverse as Alain Badiou, Edward Said, and Richard Rorty, as is the equally vague and indeterminate (enigmatic) term ‘human rights’. What such critics share is an interest in ‘facts on the ground’ versus new ‘performative’ abstractions ... / As such, it is the encounter with abject nihilism (Baudrillard’s "Desert of the Real"?) that prompts, in turn, irrepressibly, the countervailing ‘call (vision) of the Sublime’. What calls, then, from within this call is a perennial Question Mark, the Figure 8 (the doubling of Infinity / Eternity), the principal (perhaps rhetorical) question being, "Is radical empiricism the same thing as radical immanence?". If yes, then ‘when’ (in what time and horizon) might they converge, and ‘how’ (through what agency)? Additionally, pace Nietzsche, ‘why’ do they converge (to what end)? Or, ‘what’ might be the outcome? ... If no, then which of the two holds the ‘promise’ of non-Hegelian, horizontal (syntagmatic) versus vertical (hegemonic/paradigmatic) synthesis (the hoped for ‘Coming Philosophy’ of Walter Benjamin, or the Benjaminian ‘Coming Community’ of Giorgio Agamben)? (07/14/04)ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY /S/EA - Topological jouissance?: 1/ If radical empiricism (Jamesian, neo-Bergsonian, Deleuzionary vitalism?) is the Way Out, then what of the pull of poeticized consciousness (Bachelardian surrationalism)?; 2/ If radical immanence is the Way Out, then whence the liberation of ‘innocent’ things from subject/object dichotomies, from the proverbial, age-old(e) metaphysical chains (ideological and otherwise) excoriated by almost every Overman (and every progressive assault on metaphysics) since the demolition projects perpetrated by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein? If both radical empiricism and radical immanence (radical phenomenology?) turn on the idea of the phenomenologically-inspired concept of the ‘relational’ (no ideas without things?), or on the specter of an affective Sublime (a sublime aesthetics?), is that enough to bring the chiasmus (the divergent narratives/narratologies) of materialist and subjective-idealist thought together ‘within’ a new synthetical, ‘non-ontological ground’, the merging of milieu(x) and anti-milieu(x)? / Lastly, and returning (again) to cinema, it was Jean-Luc Godard’s Eloge de l’Amour which most effectively summarized the state of things circa 2000-2001 (the turn of the millennium), insofar as Godard utilizes ‘Normandy’ (or was it ‘Brittany’?) as the place where ‘land’ and ‘sea’ intertwine (recalling Proust’s obsession with the same rugged, ‘meta-geographical’ coordinates?), time and space dissolving into one another in the sublime spectacle that marks the end of this edgy, elegiac, and other-worldly voyage into the ineluctable nothingness (a dual nothingness/wilderness) marking the passage of post-contemporary Western culture toward god(ard) knows what. Thus, the discursive ‘space’ of cinema seems to prefigure the ‘non-ontological ground’ long sought, long deferred, and (probably) long vanquished by both instrumental and pure reason -- that is the place of the Imaginary (after Kant, and most certainly after Freud/Lacan). It would, therefore, appear that whatever cinema is, it is first and foremost the essential (irreal) poeticized version of the Real endlessly problematized by Lacan as phantasmatic, endlessly anathematized by pragmatists (as doing nothing much useful), and endlessly critiqued (and misrepresented) by rote anti-formalists (as advanced navel-gazing) ... "Sic transit gloria mundi" (07/16/04)
CONVERSATION WITH THE /S/ELF (THE FAIT ACCOMPLI) - Q: "Which is more real, this world or the other?" A: "Neither." / Q: "What do you mean?" A: "Both." / Q: "Which is to say?" A: "Nothing." (07/14/04)Q&A: A PROPOS (DE) LACAN - Q: "In our reservoir of images, is there an adequate image of evil? Is there an image of evil that occupies the very place of the lack of the Image?" / A: "As to the question of whether there is an image of evil that occupies the very place of the lack of the image. I would say yes, there is. It is what we call a sublime splendor, shine, glare, glow, aura. It belongs to the Imaginary register, although it is not an image, in the strict sense of the word; rather it is that which makes a certain image shine and stand out. You could say that it is an effect of the Real on our imagination, the last veil or screen that separates us from the impossible Real." Christoph Cox, Alenka Zupancic, "On Evil: An Interview with Alenka Zupancic", Cabinet 5 (Winter 2001), p. 76
THE CALL / THE HUNT - Even ‘after metaphysics’, there remain two kinds of nothingness: 1/ A sublime nothingness (nominally seen from the ‘outside’, so to speak, and suggestive of the always absent ‘Other’ and the hauntings of form associated with deconstructivist and post-structuralist exegesis); and 2/ An abject nothingness (experienced from within, as cipher for endless semiosis, and denoting a vast field of depleted signifiers, resonating with the fear and loathing at the dark heart of Existentialism). Whether these two forms of nothingness are, in fact, the same nothingness merely seen from different perspectives (different ‘subjective’ territories) is an open question. And yet, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) thought always accompanies (crosses) the possible nothingness which the Old Man of Königsberg approaches on tiptoe and turns from perplexed, circling back. It is Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given (2002) that places Kant’s confrontation with Nothingness in perspective, insofar as Marion finds in it the crisis implicit in the extreme, formalistic exercises of the Kantian critique itself (within the metaphysical straightjacket itself). Marion brings this crisis to a tentative resolution by suggesting that so-called ‘saturated phenomena’ actually invoke, at once, the two infinities brought over from Pascal’s Pensées (1660), in the process, perhaps, re-inscribing (re-writing) the Platonic chora (‘place of taking-place’) as a site for a unique condition he calls ‘givenness’, situating it simultaneously in the imagination and in the world versus in an ideal, purely atemporal world. It is the self-presentation of the Given (those purely phenomenal things that give themselves, of their own volition, crossing the gaze of ‘the witness’, through ‘anamorphosis’) that demolishes the last vestiges of the metaphysical chiasmus represented in thought by the two infinities for over two millennia. As such, these two infinities ‘meet’ in the saturated phenomena of the Given. What remains, then, is a ‘picture’ of the radically immanent ‘nature’ of the world (its sublime ‘inwardness’) -- that is to say, a world of things given without measure (without resort to abstract, disembodied concepts, without ideologies and empty/hollow Master Signifiers, and all without resort to a giver, transcendental or otherwise). ‘Here’ and ‘now’ we see a long-standing promise perhaps delivered; that which animated myth and legend, medieval romances and modern subjective-idealist heresies. This ‘promise’, essentially, and with Marion, is that that thing which tore the world asunder (abstract intellect) may also 'one day' heal the world. From Ficino to Rousseau to Goethe to Hegel runs this ‘mythic’ quest for synthesis (the 'Rose'?). And yet this synthesis must be non-hegemonic and destroy the last vestiges of illicit forms of metaphysical mayhem utilized (always) to ‘divide’ and ‘rule’ the world. Perhaps, after all, ‘here’ arrives (at last, and on dove’s feet) the negation of negation. (07/09/04)
LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER - "Sweet Yams in the fields of Harbo. Made me feel better. They took the straw from off the roof. To make the fire catch as it should. They boil the water and they cook the roots. For them it’s new. For me old fruits. But more precious now than it’s ever been. We share the food in the noonday heat. Sweet Yams in the fields of Harbo. The mountains roll. Green on green. The mountains roll. Green on green." --Geldof, "Scream in Vain" (Sherlock Holmes Music Ltd., 2002)DOUBLE-BLACK CAT / THE DREAM - In a dream I rescued a half-starved, emaciated cat and nursed it back to health. It was a double-long, black cat with a patch of flame-orange on its side. It was as if two black cats had been spliced together with an odd bit of a third, orange cat thrown in for good measure. The orange patch reminded me of a semi-wild tomcat I adopted long ago, a cat that arrived out of nowhere and, later, vanished. He used to sit on the mantle of the fireplace like a Staffordshire china cat. Once restored to health, the stretch-limo style cat was velvety-black, wildly elegant and incredibly beautiful. Thus, the mysterious sign of infinity doubled approaches (always) on cat’s paws. (07/17/04) / What is a double-black cat? See Letter to No One (RTF) ...
BLACK HOLES - Regarding ‘Einsteinian monsters’ and/or The Celestial Sublime / "A supermassive ghostly Robeson robed in nothingness, / I serenade the void from the heart of the Perseus Cluster, / underhumming the underpinnings of the galaxies in B flat, / ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ at 57 octaves below middle C. / Not even God hears me. / But any one of these icy nights beneath the warbling stars, / those shards of horns long shivered that still take solos, / if you close your eyes you can almost sense my presence, / holding down the cosmic bottom for billions of years, / blowing the antisong of the antispheres." --Mikhail Horowitz, "Black Hole Hums Deepest Note Ever Detected" ("Songs of the Galaxies, and What They Mean", The New York Times, 08/03/04)
--Rimbaud, "Alchimie du verbe"
Harvesting the 20th Century (Samizdat)
Looking Awry (Soma) / Modernity (Honestly) (Samizdat) / Appropriating Pascal (Anti-Journal) / Pays de Tendre (Samizdat) / Echoes: Autumn 2004 (Anti-Journal) / The Philosophy of the (Ir)Real (Looking Awry) / Nightfall (Soma) ...
