fragilekeys

“Poetry as a Spiritual Exercise,“ by Jean-Wahl (1942)
translation by Timothy Lavenz (2013)

A spiritual exercise, first, in the etymological sense of the word: exercise of the breath, of rhythm – and this rhythm will be both passive and active, a passivity sent up into activity –, poetry is also a spiritual exercise in a more profound sense. It is an exercise for becoming conscious (sometimes an infinitesimal consciousness) of the unconscious. Even Valéry, who talks about the first lines of verse being given to him, of the rhythms he discovers by surprise at the origin of his poems, and of the intermediary states between consciousness and the unconscious, would not deny it; even Mallarmé, who sees ideas surge up from the blank page, and a clarity that emerges from the night of Idumea. And, inversely, the surrealists must well know what part consciousness plays for them.

An exercise which also consists in manipulating in a mysterious way time and space. Condensing and elongating time, the poet creates a time that is no longer the time of the everyday. He isolates a moment to which he gives its own duration, incommensurable with ordinary time, at once longer and shorter; longer because of its infinite resonances, shorter because of its ecstatic and instantly rapt character.

This isolated instant, that of the poet, is an instant no longer isolated, in which a duality, a plurality, a multitude of instants shine and are condensed. An instant that no longer exists as an instant.

And the poet creates a space in it, infinitely near, infinitely remote, this living space which is that of the work of art, and which Rilke, inspired by the lessons of sculpture, knew how to make us feel. A space that no longer exists as space.

In this time and this space, which are at the same time so near and so far away from us, everything becomes, at the same time, near and far away.

The mysterious is here quite near; and the here-quite-near is mysterious. These two affirmations, one Coleridge’s and the other Wordsworth’s, rejoin each other; they both knew it, and Novalis, perhaps better than they, became conscious of these two movements that appear contradictory.

Every work is an operation, an experience that takes place, is made [se fait].

Thus the question recently posed to me by a young poet, if is poetry an evasion or an exploration, loses meaning. All great poetry is an evasion only in appearance. It is an evasion only because it goes deeper.

And, like this the poet is created, he is the poet of himself, delivering himself from his demons, excusing himself, dedicating himself.

And finally silence comes. Perhaps poetry is only our way of coloring and making vibrate the silence that succeeds us, or which is contemporary with us.

Often, it is not the meaning of a verse that grabs and holds us, but something else, the interior accompaniment and care it brings up within us.

When it comes to speaking to others, the poet hesitates, he doesn’t read well his poem. Or he reads it as if it were another’s. He reads it without comprehending it. Thus Claudel when he puts on his glasses and acts just like a notary when he reads his great works. Deplorable, in reality admirable way of reading Claudel. Some other makes of his poems, by his hesitations, something shredding. Must we distrust poets who read their works too well? No; I know of some who can restore about their work the atmosphere from which it was born.

Some poets have told us the method of their exercises; Shelley, how he cultivates his astonishment, or more simply lets it develop on its own; Hölderlin, Poe, Rimbaud, who disrupt every meaning; Mallarmé.

We shouldn’t speak of poetry as a spiritual exercise anyway, but of each mode of poetry as a particular spiritual exercise. What could be farther apart than the strict arches underneath which a Dante makes us pass, and this open space where Whitman makes us breath among immense waves and winds? And yet there’s no less infinity in the first than in the second.

Will we then be led to say that all poetry is the creation of a world? We note well the character of creation and totality there in poetry. But, owing to certain realist tendencies I feel in me, or to a certain incapacity, I would hesitate to define poetry as a “creation of the world.” Of course the idea of the world is the effect of an illusion, at once retrospective and totalizing. Poetry is rather the creation of a language or a music, of a language which is a music.

Perhaps we should add, after having envisaged poetry as a spiritual exercise, that the poet must not be too conscious of poetry as an exercise, and that poetry is not only an exercise. “Exercise” puts the accent on the activity. “Experience” (if one takes the word in the sense James takes it when he speaks of religious experience) puts the accent on passivity. Exercise, experience, creation, poetry is also an adventure.

Fontaine, 1942

Translation of “La Poésie comme Exercise Spirituel,” from Poésie, Pensée, and Perception, by Jean-Wahl,  1948.

Walter Benjamin once wrote, “the knowledge of which we can give the clearest account will be the most profound.” For Benjamin, this meant a theory of knowledge and a concept of experience as little grounded in subjectivity and “cognizing consciousness” as possible. Such knowledge will have been liberated from the subject-object dichotomy, which has dominated understanding in the modern era. That is, it would no longer follow the paradigm of adequatio intellectus et rei, where the subject’s knowledge was justified insofar as its representations corresponded “adequately” to the objects it represented. Why, exactly, should we reject this paradigm? Because not only does it tend to deny any world apart from the subject’s own representations (its “world-view”), but also because it tends to deny experience itself – for in experience the split between subject and object presupposed here can never in truth be achieved, and the represented world never really matches the one experienced. In other words, by asking the subject to represent the world of experience as an object, even as its own object, it cannot not help but get trapped in the solipsism of its own constructions, and to deny – by repression or outright hostility – whatever does not fit into the world of its “view.” It is this totalizing aspect of cognizing consciousness that Heidegger also diagnoses in his important essay, “The Age of the World Picture.”

To obtain a clearer account of knowledge and experience would mean, first, to liberate ourselves and our account from the trap of objectivizing consciousness, and to forgo any grounding operation in the subject, in its representations and “self-certainties.” Indeed, the difference between self-certainty and experience would have to be kept constantly in mind. Every “knowledge claim” (if claims we make) would have to be articulated in the space of this difference, in the gap between self-certainty and its failure. Eschewing knowledge directly defined by the subject and its “impositions,” our account would seek not to ground itself per se, but to expose itself; and it would strive to reveal experience itself the ex-position of the “subject.” Exposition has the meaning of “setting forth the meaning or purpose,” but also of displacement, shifting, reorienting, and re-moval. A theory of knowledge based in exposition would therefore strive be displaced on the spot, without however surrendering the rigor of “knowing.” The question becomes: How to encode this incessant shifting? How to articulate this zone of nonknowledge where the subject as such “blacks out”? How to bear witness to desubjectification? How to think, exposed at every point, radically “open”? How, in a word, to know oneself at a distance from oneself – to know experience as ungraspable, yet whole?

To articulate an experience stripped of subjective delusions and its corresponding reliance on “world-views” does not mean articulating a new subject-position or advancing a new world-view. On the contrary, it will never be a matter of adopting a new standpoint, but of thinking ourselves and our “being-in-the-world” outside of standpoints and positions as such – of rethinking them from the inside out, bringing them to a halt and loosening our reliance on them altogether; and so to take ourselves up into a more total involvement, named experience, which is nothing if not exposed. The task for this knowledge would be to enter experience and its “event” as such – not to know “about” this, that, and the other thing, but to reveal experience to itself on its own terms, over the abyss of its own (non)knowledge and freedom. To do so means to come to terms with this: that all necessity in experience is lacking (no necessary position, world-view, expression, idea, trajectory, etc.). Our theory must take this into account right at the level of its own formulation; that is, it must accept its own “contingency.”

To be aware of contingency means to withdraw from all fixity. It means living displacement and exposition; somehow this must be brought to the exposition. Yet this does not “relativize” anything, as if cutting everything up into a meaningless stream of nothings. On the contrary, only with a thoroughgoing awareness of contingency do we become aware of the “absolute value” of each, do we free ourselves to whatever is coming “next.” Likewise, it frees up our use of knowledge: because there is no final destination, each step along the way becomes “vitally important.” There is no more correctness than there are any mistakes. This implies an experience of the precision of the instant, the absoluteness of what comes. It reveals the preciousness of each instant, articulation, and “fragment of life.” It reveals that it doesn’t lead up to anything and doesn’t have to; it reveals every instant as culmination. Each one, each instant: absolute and irreplaceable. But once again, there’s no necessity in this.

Relevant knowledge only opens and exposes, without end, and so it refuses to resist its own reformulation, because only in this way does it remain justified and true. To hold knowledge to the precision of the instant, absolutely: only thus do we create a world instead of just representing one.

To inscribe experience into theory, without relying on any self-certainty or world-view, calls for a mode of exposition as fragmentary, exposed, and uncertain as experience itself. But this has nothing to do with the intentional writing of fragments no more than it does with trying to add everything up. Our starting-point is never intention, nor a given mode of exposition, nor an anticipated unity, but always the event of existence as it comes. Perhaps we could reference Heidegger here, who alludes to this fragmentary method as a leaping from station to station along a path of thinking, such that a momentary clearing is forged at each station, while simultaneously, and from within the cleared area, new paths to be cleared immediately present themselves:

For the author himself there remains the necessity to speak each time in the language that is, in each case, appropriate to the very stations on his way.

Of course, we would have to ask what exactly is meant by “one’s own” here. How might this “one’s own” be justified in light of our previous considerations? And on the other hand, can we really keep from thinking existence in terms of “ownness”? Isn’t everything from our bodily existence to our existence in language geared to this “mineness” of sensation, thought, and expression? In lieu of an extended analysis, we can at least say that Heidegger pointed toward an “owning” of existence in light of the very impossibility of “owning” it – an experience of “ownness” as of the inappropriable, of the inappropriable as our “ownmost” – which is, simply put, the experience of existence (freedom…). At each instant, there is the surprise of this inappropriable event as the surprise of “being oneself,” which is nevertheless never “mine” in terms of a property. –At any rate, that we can still detect in Heidegger’s thinking various traces of the subject-paradigm, which on the other hand he never tired of questioning, indicates that the only “exit” from this paradigm will be painstakingly indirect. As we have said, it does not imply that some substitute should come in place of the subject. Rather, what we have to do is to think and speak the subject at the limit - exposed, displaced, neutralized, and deactivated. To do so implies, precisely, calling into question every one of our constructions, at every point. Only with a vigilant attention to the contingency of our own formulations will we, perhaps, achieve a theory of knowledge justified in experience, and to the very extent that it remains open to this inappropriable event of existence that, paradoxically, is ours.

Perhaps, then, we could say that at each station along the way there is a new language to make “one’s own.” This means that the language that comes to us is never “originally” ours (or anyone else’s, for that matter). On the contrary, what we say always comes from elsewhere (and returns there). Our voice is not properly our own until we make it so, by exposing ourselves to it. We do not so much constitute it, as it constitutes us; and however much the subject “owns” its voice, the unity of this voice must be called into question at every station, exposed to ever new voicings (as in music). For there is no “application” of our voice, nor of our knowledge; we must only study it, what it says to us and presents to us as our own. Otherwise, there is no path of thinking, but only a series of assertions that refuse experience. Whereas it is experience itself that calls all these unities into question. It is experience itself that exposes us to our own “newness-of-self,” undoes every supposed “world-view,” and brings us into contact with always-other voices – for even our own voice is inevitably, always already, another(’s) voice.

What we must think, then, is how the unity of the voice – and so of our theory of knowledge – has nothing to do with the unity of an intention or a subjective presence that would somehow take precedence over the exposure of the voice in all its voicings, or over the exposure of life in all its events. The task of this theory of knowledge would be to comprehend how the unity of “a” being, “a” voice, “a” subject, and so of knowledge itself, is constantly thwarted in experience. That is, we would have to understand the “unity of experience” starting from this experience of “self-unity” being thwarted, instantly so, incessantly so – because, in a sense, to be thwarted, to “error,” is precisely what’s called for here. Such is life, after all. That, at least, is our experience: there can be no “ownness” without it, without erring - without being exposed to the other that comes.

Not by the glue of intention, then, nor by the workings of logic and world-view, but solely in resonance, in reception, do the words of this “theory of knowledge” hold together and hold true – in the “openness of self-opening,” in the break-up and “death of intention.” It is in this sense that we can say the “unity of experience” being articulated here begs resonance from you. It asks that we deepen our sense of “togetherness,” not as subjects in an intersubjective milieu, but as friends who co-constitute, co-implicate, and even “co-sense” or “con-sent” to one another – who, in a sense, only “are” in their relationship to one another. To be with, to be in relation, suspended: this is the essence of experience, its eventfulness, its existence, and the authority of all knowledge rests on what’s revealed in resonance and in reception of this event, and of all the others in it. Otherwise, what truth could there really be? Knowledge can only base itself on the claim that experience makes on itself, and which others make on it, which is always revealed intimately, albeit an intimacy cut loose – shuddering, wondering, exposed, shared out, and free…

Infinity cut loose: nothing but a call to rethink relationship as such, a new practice toward self, other, and world, of receptivity, rooted in the deactivation of every apparatus that would capture experience and subjugate its freedom, and so dedicated to an exposition that would aim to justify itself only to the extent that it exposed itself in full. Justification only in this: relay, passage, transmission, and exchange. In sum, a mode of expression rooted in listening. Here we ponder, in a state of maximum receptivity, a new future for ourselves as subjects and a new comprehension of our history, where the subject is grabbed hold of and overrun by love in its very tracks. Nothing less than a “messianic abbreviation” of time, as Benjamin put it, where thought reaches its zero-hour (Stillstellung): a pause sustained mid-action, waiting on the surprise of the event, waiting on the other I will have been. In other words, always in other words: experience.

… A sensitive (riven) man writes, but only to reach where he knows he cannot reach, to attain the unattainable. He imagines that the instant of writing creates these future encounters, but he knows his imagination fails him. God – the possibility of connecting – fails him, leaves him high and dry. And the idea that failure (non-success at the “game” of being) would usher in some kind of secret achievement also lent him no consolation. For he wanted, here in the writing, but more importantly everywhere, to be level-headed; and yet he could not seem to avoid being a clown – and, what’s worse, obviously being one. He couldn’t find that proper perspective that would dignify or justify his bellows and his blurbs. Imagine a photographer before a breathtaking expanse, his camera ever poised, but whose hands were so buried in the earth that he never got a chance to take his shot. That is, he saw no way to present in a total way the beauty of what his hands worked, of what they felt – his thought, his life, his experience – being buried. However, distantly it’s true, he intuited from time to time that he had encoded it somewhere, all of it in fact, however dispersed – though in a way he could not, exactly, manage or access, its sense always elsewhere than in the present of his capturing; and yet inevitably it was somewhere – somewhere else, invariably – where what he’d said could not help but became clearer, calmer, and more accurate, having somehow resisted the erosion that time had exercised over him and his own speech. But this intuition never took him very far; he had to be practical. And so he started the whole thing over each time, forced to rely again on the clown’s spontaneous conjurations, escaping sui generis, surrendered to the surprise effects of grammar and tight squints, the fortuity of never-fixed forms and downright boring ideations. No, this game gave him little hope to go on. And yet he wrote. Besides, he knew he would live on until there was no more – which, after all, was something.

–To write, to really compose – to really philosophize, these days, if you like– requires something immeasurably precious, then, always extending, always extenuated: respect for “oneself,” one’s aleatory and precarious presence, always othered-without-return, always thrown to chance – the world – alone but never alone, confused and basically blown to bits – but always touching something or someone – always riven, always written as such. A writing whose effects could not be planned, but could only let themselves be affected by another (always another) right now, interrupted and opened to everything in that other “one.” You had to learn how to sustain this crazy respect for the other within – for the other one you’d never know. Such respect, however, could only be sustained in that, each time, some new relationship was drawn: a line extended between you and another, you and me perhaps, but always between one respected “plus” another respected “one.” To write, then: to achieve an impossible connection, to situate oneself in the taking-place of place itself – of relationship – “invisible” but with nothing behind it, instantly broken off and right at the surface, where the truth of what we shared was twice revealed and lost. To connect, then, here: to inspire and drive further the “cause” of such reckless abandon; to conjure the spirit or truth of abandon and to summon ourselves to it. To bring to light exposure as such – to sing and put the lighter to oneself.

–No. To write is just this: to befriend, without meeting, without contact.

–To befriend, finally: to respect ourselves; to respect the all we have to shout and sing.

The profound instinct for how one would have to live in order to feel oneself ‘in Heaven’, to feel oneself ‘eternal’, while in every other condition one by no means feels oneself ‘in Heaven’: this alone is the psychological reality of ‘redemption’. — A new way of living, not a new belief…

Nietzsche once observed that the rarest things, by definition, are the most fragile, the most precarious or “fortuitous.” A splendid color, on an orchid or in a painting, cannot be traced back to causes. They bedazzle because their sources can’t be traced; we can’t tell how many number of things had to go right for them to occur. Thus rarity also inspires a sense of luckiness: an unprecedented bestowal, a superabundant surprise (like the gift of time itself). Of course, what’s rare can always be something terrible, an accident. Perhaps we can never tell what’s good or bad when it comes to rarities: “noble” things outstrip these moral measurements. What’s rare exists as if by chance, good or bad. If it goes on, it goes on in jeopardy, and at any moment its streak can be broken. Rare things are rare because they are rarely pursued, because the heights to which rare things rise inspires vertigo. Rarity also implies gambling, running a risk that can’t be accounted for, not even by the being or thing being risked. Of course, humans pursue greater risks, up the ante on rarity and fragility, become somewhat conscious of it happening and so enter ever deeper into the mystery of their worlds. And the more we risk, the more fragile, the more world, the rarer. Perhaps that even defines us at our best, but nevertheless, all we can say about rare things (like us) is that they happen/ed, that we come to pass and keep passing. Beyond this, we are often struck dead mute. Even the rare person, or the rare achiever, is forced to acknowledge: “I have no idea how this really happened, how everything fell into place at the end of my efforts; I am just thankful that it did…”

Perhaps we could read Nietzsche’s attraction to Jesus and his rare instincts in this manner. Nietzsche wants to separate Jesus’ instinct or force from his “person,” and especially from his religious persona as it is framed in the churches. He knew that there could only be a Christian practice, an existing instinct, drive, or “light” and not a belief-system or form of worship. (Nietzsche reckoned the “religion” surrounding the event of Jesus’ death a hangover of the Jewish priesthood.) To separate out Jesus’ “force” meant, for Nietzsche, isolating the ‘redeemer type’. To isolate this out means weighing Jesus’ experience as such. He has to be understood as offering a form of life, a call to a different way of being, open to our uppermost limits. Of course, the question of “force” in Nietzsche’s thought is not limited to his consideration of Jesus; but it would seem that Jesus fits the mold of his main motifs: amor fati, “powerless” will to power, concern with a community based in a free spirit (“we others”), dissolution or emptying as creation, eternal recurrence, the desire to take a great gamble with one’s life, to live in service to the truth and to undergo everything for it…

Nietzsche is not shy about his goals, even if he is a bit shyer than Jesus: he wants to send a shock wave through humanity, “split humanity in two.” This implies contesting Jesus, not by “refuting” Christianity (which has little to do with Jesus), but by meeting him on the court of existence, answering the challenge by trying to match up in stature in terms of spirituality, earnestness, and symbolism. To use a slang term that also suggests other, more fatal possibilities, we could say that Nietzsche wanted to “hang” with Jesus.

Above all, with Jesus Nietzsche wants to say we: ”we emancipated spirits”. Nietzsche wages war on Jesus the way only two spiritual brothers (friends-enemies) could: for place of rank, where questions of glory carry the day. Of course, this is the glory attributable to “everyone and no one,” far beyond any notion of “winning,” in fact lacking any return benefit. It is only measured by the degree of truth suffered. This rivalry prefigures what Nietzsche calls the future age of the “Great Politics,” where men will go to “war” with one another in a battle for the greatest, most life-affirming knowledge. This is no hand-to-hand combat, but a battle of wits and wisdom waged at a distance between spirits who know they help and emancipate each other. On this battlefield, the question is: whose love will be the greatest? Who will give back the most? Who will be the most affirmative? (Didn’t Jesus say that some will come after him who will do greater things than he?)

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To come close to an experience “like unto God” means holding “God” beyond being and conceptuality, beyond any human construct, and so to go to the limits of language feeling the other within us. “God” hearkens an unexpected force that wells up and calls us, a light that lives and plays in the world like a child, however serious its duties might be. God names this inner drive to ever-exceed, to always want more (love, joy, eternity)– that is, names our exposure to strange others, unfamiliar lives and things. That contact and friction passes through us, pervades our being and exceeds it, pulls it outside of itself. We intuit it and, sometimes, call it God, or epiphanic experience: that which surprises us, changes us, and yet feels strangely most us, most our own. “Inner experience,” a relation unto us, a relation of our own, “written” on our hearts or our souls (and not on legal tablets or in moral theory). Nietzsche writes of Jesus:

If I understand anything of this great symbolist it is that he took for realities, for ‘truths’, only inner realities– that he understood the rest, everything pertaining to nature, time, space, history, only as signs, as occasion for metaphor.

With Jesus, this inner reality always passes through another (God, neighbor), a feeling ever-greater than he is, which is still only his. He exhibits an extreme vulnerability to the Other, down beneath his own cognition and into his flesh and bones, his carnal sensitivity, to the point of being utterly “at the disposal of the Other’s” (1). This inner reality pours itself out, spreading across humanity, moving through all the “outsides”: world, language, fellow humans, things, the body itself (spirit is the embodied relation linking and unlinking all these). His force is always in relation to someone or something else, a differential force, first off to “God,” to pure excess, the eternity he feels and is. Jesus bears witness to this excess and this opening as an affirmation of life and of the time remaining. In always passing through another, he attests to being-in-relation as being’s “inner reality,” made up by its relationship to (all) Others, surpassing our ability to know. We are caught up in this relationship before we know it– it makes us who we are, we are it.

Force, pulse, excess, energy, inner reality, outside, relation, experience, vulnerability… These are all ways of untranslating something untranslatable, which Jesus attests to above and beyond all else: the blessedness of life and existence. “Kingdom of God” opens up not in another world but in this one, right in the middle of utmost difficulties. It opens up here. We come into relation with eternity only here. Jesus’ instinct is for the eternal in the instant, and in light of that no trial is too much. Just to be there is to feel gifted. Nietzsche interprets Jesus’ symbolism:

…in the word ‘Son’ is expressed the entry into the collective feeling of the transfiguration of all things (blessedness), in the word ‘Father’ this feeling itself, the feeling of perfection and eternity.

The redeemer type appears as though straddling these two extremes, one that comes in the form of a supreme call to life and practice (entry), the other in the form of an acceptance, a sense for the perfection of the instant, a willing of what is. A simple feeling, the freedom of existence. The paradox is that however much Nietzsche and Jesus point us to faith, practice, and transfiguration, they also point, and often with greater insistence, toward loving the instant, cherishing everything to the point of incandescence, beyond all human knowledge and planning, like a child. Chance is exceeded by loving it, falling in:

The ‘glad tidings’ are precisely that there are no more opposites; the kingdom of Heaven belongs to children; the faith which here finds utterance is not a faith which has been won by struggle — it is there, from the beginning, it is as it were a return to childishness in the spiritual domain.

Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to any conditions: it is the only reality– the rest is signs for speaking of it…

The ‘glad tidings’ are that there is no “work” to be done. Our struggle is of absolute value in itself. Our struggle is to affirm what we live as our own. Life does not point to any beyond, no final day of consecration, and suffering is not the price we pay to get to heaven, nor is our time on earth just a sojourn on our way to the eternal home. No, the eternal home is here, in the suffering, in the time on earth that is gifted to us. As Jesus says, speaking in sign-language again, the Kingdom of God is among us, within us. Blessedness is reality, reality is blessed. God is “near,” presence itself approaching, coming, almost here, here, and still coming. Which also means: right there, out there, elsewhere, somewhere else.

Nietzsche understands the Kingdom in a similar way, as an experience of the heart, an experience of existence as “untimely,” out of this world. But however much effort one contributes (and the effort seems immense), this experience is not won by struggle, but rather by the exposure in the instant to the other, to what exceeds the struggle from within it. “Redemption,” if there is any, is of the instant, is instant: eternity in the blink of an eyelid. As Nietzsche writes of Jesus’ faith and mode of existence: “it is every moment its own miracle, its own reward, its own proof, its own ‘kingdom of God’. Neither does this faith formulate itself — it lives, it resists formulas.”

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To deal with the dual impression we’ve gathered– that we are asked to enter blessedness through practice, and that the blessedness of reality does not depend on our efforts– we might turn to Nietzsche’s thought of amor fati. In an early rendition, he writes that amor fati means, ”learning to see as beautiful what is necessary in things,” so as to “make things beautiful.” Already we see the similarities with what he later calls the redeemer type, who is able to enter into what is necessary, even death, and discover what is beautiful– so as to introduce something unprecedented into it, to maximize its highest instinct, to make room for the surprising event, or even to ally all beings together in spirit and in love. Amor fati indicates a way of suffering life patiently, suffering/loving others, doubling everything that happens with an affirmation of the fact that it happened– while also pursuing one’s highest “creative” potential within this “event” of God’s coming to us, in us, with us. Perhaps this is not unlike Kierkegaard’s notion of “suffering everything for the good,” mixed with the single-mindedness of the honest and patient (above all, Nietzsche valued probity).

To make necessary things beautiful would be to enter into an ever greater relationship to things themselves, so as to relate them together and them to us. This is no different than what a curious child does, free of time itself. Compositely, amor fati would name a practice of the instant as the opening of eternity right here, in the absolute singular, everywhere-nowhere. This eternity, which is the redeemer type’s instinct and experience, is likened to the Kingdom of God that we each are:

The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart– not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death’. The entire concept of natural death is lacking in the Gospel: death is not a bridge, not a transition, it is lacking because it belongs quite to another world, a merely apparent world useful only for the purpose of the symbolism. The ‘hour of death’ is not a Christian concept– the ‘hour’, time, physical life and its crises, simply do not exist for the teacher of the ‘glad tidings’…. The ‘kingdom of God’ is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come ‘in a thousand years’ — it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere…

Approaching things this way, we can see how Jesus was no different from you and me, even if his life reveals certain inner potentials that we’ve forgotten or neglected. At any rate, the redeemer is human. Nietzsche emphasizes the fact: “The ‘Evangel’ died on his cross.” Love of fate also means love unto fatality. As much as it “rises above” all that dies, it rises above as something that dies, or at least as something that is in relation to death. For the redeemer type, Nietzsche suggests, death does not exist. Paradoxically, he only appears to die, even as he really does die. He is not so much saved from death as alive within it; not safe from death, but safe in it. Safe, therefore, in his word, in his name.

The redeemer type dies rising, infinity alive and well in his finitude, the other crossing him instantly and crossing him out, abandoning him to the fragile/rare relationship he is and enacts. But Jesus’ prerogative on earth is not special:

…he denied any chasm between God and man, he lived this unity of God and man as his ‘glad tidings’…. And not as a special prerogative!”

We share his instinct. It is rooted in our own relationship to our own (un)timeliness and death, and that in relation to our world. For that is where the whole saga takes place: in each fragile absolute abandoned to itself, abandoned to death without any saving grace or assurance, without “afterlife” and without God. Jesus presents a humanity that is both fragile, surrendered to itself, subject to corrupt political orders, to the messiness of daily life, sin, and death; and yet also the coming of another life, an infinite life in that same “worldly” life: a différant life characterized by love, by bonds less social than spiritual, bound to eternity. A way of relating to existence that elevates it automatically, that exists by instinct in a kind of natural, sublime elevation.

*

In this transition to life– similar to drive, light, and, why not, truth– fragility becomes rarity, fortuity becomes preciousness– as if it were through this awareness of, or attunement to, preciousness and rarity that the fragile became aware of itself as absolute, as “holy.” The rare opportunity of living (qua dying, Jesus says) indicates the possibility in each of us to “elevate” humanity to its highest instance (there is the motif of will-power and overman); but it also indicates the “necessity” of cherishing what is in order to elevate it (amor fati, faith). Jesus risked everything and demanded that we do so also, demanded that we change, adjust our instinct (metanoia). But this operation stems from the imperative to cherish, from the revelation that the faraway is near, that the good is opening up right here in the horrible, that the Kingdom has come about in the middle of the irreparable.

To cherish is to see things as beautiful without trying to repair or save them. Here, beauty butts up right against the abject. Such is why Jesus constantly reminds us to love what is there, to cherish what is, not for some purpose or reason or benefit, but because it is and because you are, because both are fortuitous, risked, worth loving. That simple, childish comportment is the “redeemer’s” instinct: that the ‘Kingdom’ is actual, is existence, and that the only proper response is to love it in all its misery, mystery, and glory. Against such light and love, death is powerless, without for all that saving us from it. Here, death remains far away, distant, while opening its distance from life in life itself. We are safe in that distance, in correspondence.

In existence, death is irreconcilable; but the spirit of God is that which, in humans, grabs hold of this fragility/rarity as its own, elevating it by loving it. In the end, it is not the spirit of God, but simply our spirit– our free, emancipated spirit, says Nietzsche. In this approach, we live/love from beyond the grave, to the extent that we open ourselves to the call from the other that, it would seem, first opens us. In this life is opened the possibility that we not-be, opening life down to its finest fragility, exposed to death; and in this possibility to not-be, we find the site of our eternity in the time that remains for us, the time we share before (both of our) deaths, as if outside them. It is our sense of opening as a call that excites us, this call beyond struggle in struggle that constitutes the good news. Of course, this “call” comes from everywhere: from within, from the face of the Other, from countless signals, in countless hearts. It would seem that only something so rare could be so common.

As Nietzsche would have it, the redeemer type presents to us a practice of acceptance (“passivity beyond passivity,” Levinas or Blanchot might say) mixed with supreme ambition (a sense of responsibility, a singular instinct or passion) that open up together an experience of a wholly other life in this life, of the Not-Known in this world, in this instant, an experience “within a heart,” perhaps even something natural: learning how to “feel oneself ‘eternal’”, as we began. Or it would be as Jean-Luc Nancy describes “adoration: holding to the presence of this opening,” of the outside of time in time, of an outside of the world in the world (“inner realities,” in Nietzsche’s symbolism), addressing ourselves to this wholly-other-outside. To hold to the “presence of the opening” in the present, as to what exceeds the present, as the coming-to-presence above and beyond the phenomenal now, is to adore, to think the gift of the world, its coming and its passing, and us along with it. This gift is nothing less than the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, now, among us, in the world opening it to infinity– in a world where we all await death and bear impossible witness to it. Such love, such thinking, is the practice that develops as a consequence of our condition: Godforsaken blessedness, thrown and exposed, living. Beyond that, everything is chance, glad tidings, life, thanksgiving…

Notes:

1.Wyschogrd, Edith. Saints and Postmodernism. p.xxii. I follow Wyschogrod in letting the word “Other” here shift in connotation between an all-transcendent Other (God) and human Others. However, in the paragraph referenced, she is referring exclusively to the bodily needs of the Other, and so to corporeal Others. Of course, Levinas’ account of the face as both transcendent and yet absolutely ethically obliging allows, theoretically, this shifting.

All other quotes from Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Anti-Christ, mostly sec. 32-35.
Cf. Nancy, Jean-Luc, “An Experience at Heart“

So many ways to read the poem Nobody recites. Always more than one, at least.

This either-or– born to endless night, born to sweet delight– has surely caused its share of nightmares and pious commitments. One needn’t dig far for the predestination reading: some are damned, some are saved. Some will live forever, some are just walking dead. These two natal settings (valley of tears vs. blessed fruit), in this reading, appear to have nothing to do with one another; and it’s clear which one we ought to prefer and conform to in our lives (if we’ve not already panicked ourselves into martyrdom). We might also recall Aquinas’ comment that after the Last Judgment the sight of the cursed by the blessed will only increase their heavenly delight– quite the incentive to act up! This passion to be on the right side of the birth canal (God’s judgment, supposedly) motivates a great deal in our contemporary Christian culture: anti-body morality, self-depreciating, largely obedient, other-abhorrent, rooted in a constantly reinforced existential guilt. It would seem that to live in fear of the Lake of Fire is only a short step away from believing in anything. Of course, perfect love drives out all fear– and so, probably, all beliefs.

The title of Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” alone would speak against this reading of night-delight along the lines of damnation-beatitude. Here the either-or turns into an and, the “and” of marriage, no less. Between delight and night, heaven and hell, a pact: “til death do us part.”

This “and”– which we all share– symbolizes a covenant whose narrative is unfinished, whose trajectory is yet uncertain. Those involved– we all– never quite know how to live up to what is promised here. Nor do we understand the mechanisms of forgiveness at work (human or mystical, or both). Covenant between illumination and darkness, sight and not-seeing, knowing and not-knowing, one two, dead alive. But it’s not as though these oppositions were equivalent; on the contrary, it’s a question of what a covenant does to the opposed, to those face-to-face, when they choose, or rather promise, against opposition altogether. From “either-or” to “and”, it would be a matter of rethinking “distance” (op-position) as such, the distance between two, any two, or more, realms or people, their difference and their touch. Outside of any “union,” an alliance of others, asking love. And so the distance between us, between we, all others.

–How two estranged got “married,” how two absolute singularities made a promise, “to love and to cherish,” that is, to care for the other as oneself and to encounter the other in their absolute otherness– without tampering and yet not without intimate contact– this is what all the “opposites” ask of us. Including all those oppositions operative in language, or rather, which “language” tries most passionately to represent and activate, while questioning, destabilizing. Language is married to us in our being married to ourselves, always over great distances. It marries us and we are married to it– not to a finished product, far from it, but to the beginning itself, to the risk of a long journey– meaning, we have a responsibility to undergo the relationship, its night-delight, its torments, its unbindings and its fruits, for at each juncture the night-delight of existence as such is at stake, in play. For all concepts share meanings, as we do; and each meaning can be its own only because it stands in contradistinction to all the others, as do we. The copula lies in this infinite “and.” To think is to follow the various trails of “and,” this creation and contradistinction, to live. Whereupon one learned: no Heaven and Hell outside their marriage pact. A promise, then, to maintain the “distance” while reducing it to a metaphor; or perhaps to efface the opposed terms altogether. A promise to exchange, to communicate. Night-delight, coming from this pact, originary death-life– and we, always we, between two births.

No me or you, then– not outside this strange promise, this promise to let the other be, to the point of letting them not mean anything, being effaced. No meaning to Heaven or Hell, no Heaven or Hell at all– only occasions, metaphors for our relations, to ourselves and to others. No me or you– only meetings. Fading in and out, slipping, between-the-two: experience, constant intermittence felt to be.  Each one slipping elsewhere, unified along fracture lines, tracing edges, together parting ways…

As for the original lyric, night-delight might be read as an originary oscillation between two absolutes, two incompatible conditions that are nevertheless necessary for each other– repeated daily, in all the metaphors we live by, first between sleep and wakefulness, “zombied-out” (vegged) to “mindful” (satchidananda), but also between depression and elation, anguish and ecstasy, isolation and communication, etc. Divus, root of our “divine,” as original-originary parting, without there being any original division. An original ex-posure without origin: spacing, parting, spreading, sharing. As if every part, every “thing,” were an origin, crucial in the mix. Every collision and chance, every meeting, meaning and miss. Originary appearing-departing, paired-unraveling: day/night, here/there, me/you, night/noon…

That some are born to sweet delight, and some to endless night, might mean just this: we are all born together. We are each born to both– born into the world, and out of it.

Perhaps, then, there is a lightness in Nobody’s lyric– more appropriate for Blake anyhow– which his grave tone betrays (though this light is not, perhaps, without its fury). Some of us wake up each day, some of us don’t. Some die, of course. All the same, they lived, and live, like us, in us, awake-asleep in us to varying degrees, in we who are always also ”all alone together.” Which places us, inevitably, somewhere in the middle. Endless night, sweet delight, you and me, going together.

“Finitude”: position bearing shaky departing, incalculably timed, displaced-redirected through it (space), limited-unlimited Nobody at the headless helm, singing the song as he likes, “trembling in sense,” discovering strangely vacuity and plenitude in every part co-presenting, discovering then (it seemed) absent center, thus feeling (as if) nothing (had been) discovered– Enduring whole bodies / a whole body, and each part, in the total trembling, every morn and every night, “in sickness and in health,” and nowhere else (but) in between. And so, no first moment for us, ever, and no last either. No origin, no ending, no covers on the book, but only passages, pages, each one tearing off or flipped up like us, ever more pages paging us, calling us from here or there, from here to there, beyond…

Long behind, or far up in front, ahead of those parting off ways and inside them, a covenant, vowed not to understand but to speak, to share our opposed/never-opposed voices and concepts. To recite the poem and interpret it, why not? Perhaps, then, hope, understanding, between two, always two, and always more, night and noon.

Once again, nothing satisfies. Highlights of refined intellectual insight, tight passages of poetry, breathy rigors of the negative dialectic– all this bores me. More boring are my own words– my own insight, poetry, negativity– including my denunciation of everything that would give the self a false sense of assurance against its death.

That ultimate question– “Why go on?”– no longer has any meaning for me. There was never any going on, or anything to go on. Nothing was ever going on, or going to. There is no language in these words, and everything I’ve done is stamped with the most ruthless absurdity. All I’m doing is hanging on, waiting on death– and “enjoying” the nameless life I lead by waiting methodically, patiently, openly. I feel as if I’ve learned all there is to know; what comes next is only the useless work of communicating it, writing books. But there’s no one at all to do this work; I don’t ever contradict what I’ve learned. My ax strikes at the same start every time, and nothing ever gets broken. And so there’s no reason to ask, “What good is it?” since it isn’t anything– since everything is already perfect.

And so the only thing left to do is to become fearless; and to do so, or to appear to do so, with utmost ease. My goal is to strike down any thought that would be self-defeating, and to pursue every thought that gives me strength. I know I’m isolated in this– there is no other way. But what makes me strong bursts the bubbles of isolation instantly. Therefore: I will not be surprised if in a very short time I am the universe– or dead, if there’s a difference.

Clearly, I wasn’t sent here. I’m not a messenger and there isn’t a message. I’ve seen through the horror of discourse; what’s left for me is to endure the pain of being distanced further. It is this pain that strengthens me. I have horrible dreams because of it– which makes my unshakeability even more amazing (a dream with my mother in 1979, before I was born but in my first bedroom, bedridden, her eyes bulging and swollen, her face ghastly thin, leaning up like a cripple from under the covers, her head surrounded by a carrion aura, as I crack the door and she screams, “Your father doesn’t love us anymore!”).

I feel the winds of Hades. I know what it is to not mean anything. I know what it is to be. I know what it is to go away. I know what it is to be fearless.

But this doesn’t excite me. I’m impatient and don’t give a damn about Jesus. I don’t care to assist humanity in anything. The only thing that matters is going your own way– doing what makes you strong, doing what makes you fearless.

And so at bottom, I’m a rat, slimy as a street peddler. I’ll say anything so long as it aggravates you out of your torpor. What I couldn’t stand were failed souls– men who never pursued anything or fell into a common mode– men who pranced around and faked their tears– men with morbid guts and bathroom senses of humor– men who accepted being boring and colorless– men who bought pillows– men who had no idea about being a warrior. I kept going, not to wake them up, but to make sure my life wasn’t as regrettable. Don’t get me wrong– I can befriend them and, to a degree, respect them, if only because of the current dearth of creative models; but mostly, I can’t stomach them and quickly flee. What I cannot abide, above all, is timidity– that clever quality of turtleing, of sidestepping, of evading, that turns men into mice or worse, and which I had to learn to force myself to fight with all the marrow in my bones. Because it’s not that we lack insights, though those are wanting too; what we really lack are actions, strong types who strive in great challenges, artists who crave nothing but grave difficulty. A society that makes “easy” its top priority is a society without a backbone; but if I go on, it’s not to save it but to have a backbone myself– to “stand for something,” to speak misleadingly. My goals aren’t lofty and in the end I’m realistic. What I’m doing seems to me to be the prerogative, if not the duty, of every man: to promise oneself a future, to be responsible for ones potentials, to risk ones life in what one does and what one says. Somehow, doing this makes one a rarity– which too often leads those who do it to despair. But I say to them that they have not given their strength enough credit– or rather, enough impetus. They have not yet demanded of themselves enough. Despair must never be left to linger. Agitation and action must force away these fogs with urgency, such that we keep in sight, however dim, the light of our own courage, and choose the paths that will lead us to the most uncompromising outcomes. For if we wallow, we are already dead; whereas if we urge ourselves to rise, to not submit to our cowardliness, we will soon taste glory– the glory of being no-one, of being strong, of being perfect.

So don’t listen to me– go away– be perfect.

FOR NOW has only been titled many years after the initial “work” on this volume started in summer 2010. I remained thoroughly “in the dark” about this book for at least 3 years– and I remain in the dark. This is appropriate since “remaining in the dark” is what FOR NOW is “about.” It radicalizes the gesture that displaces Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge in the direction of Bataille’s non-knowledge – from a stance that purports to illuminate the darkness, to a dis-stancing that purports nothing – but distances, dislocates itself (or rather, lets itself dislocate itself, lets itself be dislocated). In both Hegel and Bataille, the self is risked unto death; but unlike with Hegel, this risked self is not recovered in any movement of Spirit or in the sovereignty of any Lord. In other words: death is not turned into an operator of Truth; the self’s “negativity” does not turn into the magical power of Being. Hence, no stance can be taken here because the one who stands is nothing (cf. Agamben’s work on Homo sacer and especially on the “empty throne” of Glory (vol II, 2)). Instead, there is a being-distant-from whose only “light” is shed in traveling-between. Stated otherwise: All truth comes in “shared experience.”  To-be-true means: to-be-with. Withness alone– is the truth. This is the truth our “protagonist” seeks to uncover; the text is an invitation to uncover this truth together.

FOR NOW tries to mobilize an experience of the whole universe/all beings/the community as “me” or ”within me” – where this “me-experience” is what we share insofar as we are a being among beings – and yet equally nothing/everything ourselves. It tries to speak for every “one” by speaking from the point at which “I,” having sprung up as myself-thing, am already no longer just “me” or “something,” am already once again more “us” than “me.” In other words, where “I” am (is) “Being.” This doesn’t mean appropriating anything outside me; it means being ex-propriated, de-capitated in the name of no cause. That is, in being carried beyond myself, I do not become a mega-Me, nor is there any mega-Me (God) with whom I might merge. To “become one with the universe” means: to die, in the dark, holding on to nothing. But this leads us to the question: what if we could “hold on to nothing” right now? What if we could learn how to “hold on to everything” by holding to this “nothing” – this glorious ”nothing” of everything-opening-up-beyond-me? What if we could learn to “hold to the presence of the opening”? After all, isn’t this what makes us be in the first place? Isn’t “death” at stake in all our quintessential activities– lovemaking, mysticism, poetry, song, conversation, laughter? Is there not communication at all our openings?

In essence, FOR NOW has to do with the possibility of eternal life - with the possibility of the impossible – of a potentially endless communication (“Being”). Or again: the possibility of a singular being (something) being consciously continuous with the continuity of (all) being(s) (everything/nothing). The possibility of “me” (not your me or my me, but me!) jiving with the whole universe - eternally. And so the possibility of inhabiting or exercising, oneself, the “empty throne,” which can only fade away (deposed) – understanding that this “same” empty throne, fading away, is true for each of us - the same empty-throne experience experienced by and in each of us. The question then becomes: how might we share this empty-throne experience out?

What is called for here is a “technics of glory,” without any final term or altar of reverence. A technics of glory is what begins after “the death of God” – that is, once we have discovered the grave importance of never filling the empty place. And so the need to keep watch over absent meaning, as Blanchot tells us. What we are after is therefore a practice of “empty subjectivity” as ethos (Agamben: bearing witness to “desubjectification” constitutes the ethical subject as such (vol. III)). In other words: an in-dwelling negativity that does not become the “magical power of Being.”

Obviously, it can’t be known beforehand what any of this means, or will mean, for us; one can only enter the movement and the risk it projects. In the moves we are making, knowledge can only amount to constant discovery: limitless, endless surprise. At each step, we learn the little thing we have to learn, and lose the little self we have to lose. We needn’t worry about what comes next: we wield only erasers, never answers. We maintain ourselves along the path of a substantial emptiness, navigating our way blindly. We become conscious sous rature. But what matters here is not truth-content, nor consciousness, nor outcomes of any sort, but rather a technology - a technique of being-nothing, a way of tracing nothing’s passage through a world. It does not constitute an operation; it undoes every operation as such. How might one “identify” with that? Only by being undone, on the limit, with no recovery. Only by un-doing – exactly.

I will not prolong this theoretical lensing. I’ve posted texts spanning both ends of FOR NOW’s trajectory. At the chronological beginning are the first two books, BOTTOMED OUT and ME, EASED, ERASED. The other texts are more recent:  CONFESSION, USELESS SECRETS, COMBUSTION,ELSEWHERE, SLIPAWAY, FEARLESS, WRITING. These texts, however, do not assume any familiarity with each other whatsoever, and can be read in any order, or indeed at randomly within them. I list them in the order, not to instantiate their progression, but simply to share and keep track of their on-going form.