A Celanian Paradigm for Thought

Are these paths only roundabout ways, detours from you to you? But they are also, among how many others, paths on which language becomes voice-able. They are encounters, a voice’s paths to a perceiving You. Creaturely paths, projects for existence perhaps, a ‘sending oneself out of oneself’ to oneself, in search of oneself… A kind of homecoming. –Paul Celan [1]

I

I would like to briefly contrast two paradigms of philosophical exchange. I leave aside the content and focus on the form.

On the one hand, there is the advancement and defense of positions, the contestation of ideas and interpretations, the debate between commitments and belief systems. On the other hand, there is the conversation of thought in friendship. I acknowledge the immense simplification required to entertain this opposition; my intention is only to bring a certain fundamental option to light.

The battle of positions tends to reproduce the friend/enemy distinction. It relies upon the opposition of ‘this side’ versus ‘that side’. It fosters the partisan attitudes of, e.g., atheist versus believer, liberal versus communist, etc. This can be the case even if the rules of empathy and respect are obeyed. The goal remains the triumph of one truth over another—and the triumph of a truth as articulated, for the truth supposed to win is not usually meant to change in the course of the debate; rather it aims to strengthen itself and successfully recommend its adoption.

In what follows, I do not wish to diminish the fruitfulness or even the necessity of these battles, only to indicate a process that can occur in parallel to it and may perhaps suspend some of its protocols. The conversation of thought in friendship still involves the antagonism of positions, because without this antagonism there would be nothing to exchange. However, emphasis on frontal confrontation recedes in favor of an encounter of faces in the Levinasian sense. The model here is one of reading and thinking together on an “unknown horizon.” Its political outcome is not the victorious party but friendship.

Because I feel I can assume familiarity with the first option, I will dwell on the second—which, indeed, I recommend we adopt more wholeheartedly.

II

Our ideas are more to us than propositions and positions. Linguistic expression is only one aspect of what we feel and think. Nonetheless, it is our only way of communicating the depth of what we feel and think to others. The discipline of philosophy, of writing in general, is to clarify our feelings and ideas so that they can stand in the light of truth and communicate. This ideal is coherent with the maxim that speech and action should form a unity, that our words should be rooted in the life we are living, that language and person should coincide.[2] Note that this “should” arises from thought’s own demand to answer its questions in terms it can livingly understand. Our mode of thought ought to be as singular we are in our person, because it is that singular. This singularity is the essential element of our thought; it is even the outcome of its aspiration to the universal.

The refinement of philosophical skill, when it comes to argumentation, expression, arrangement of ideas, etc., should therefore be the servant of living a life whose truth is in-common. That is what is primary if we take philosophy as the science of the good life.

—But because there are depths to this life that are never encompassed or exhausted by a given position—because the subject is constitutively divided from its statements—because the person is more than arguments, belief systems, and books—we have to grapple with the irreducible “unsaid” of the singular being: its irreducible difference to itself, which it discovers along the paths of feeling and thinking.

This grappling begins whenever we go to clarify our own deepest thoughts, beginning with to ourselves. We confront an otherness inside us that calls for an endless pursuit of our(other)selves.[3] On this account, thought is already about welcoming self-otherness, both at the level of language and of being. One can look at this otherness as a constitutive impropriety we must work to recover as our own by overcoming the alienated habits and preprogrammed thought-patterns that prevent us from our destiny. Or one may look at it as a creative ex-propriation from what is ours, one that sends us out of ourselves, in search of ourselves through the passage through otherness, into “a kind of homecoming.” Either way, we are always underway, en route to the other—and everything, all the elements of our life, are figures of this other.

Because of this, thought can never rest satisfied to repeat itself. If it must, it must try to do so as a living animation, not with dead letters. We must ensure to take the risk of welcoming this encounter between ourselves (our thought, life, language) and the event—the event of the other, the event in its otherness. The event of the friend, and of what is other to both friends. Which brings me to the second option I am laboring to present.

III

Where does the “conversation of thought” take place? The debate platform? The online forum? The conference hall? The academic journal? The theater stage? The museum walk? The pilgrimage? The bar? The road-trip? The bedroom? The back and forth of books?

Embracing all these and more as possibilities, I wish to say simply that the conversation of thought takes place in friendship.

At the origin of friendship is the encounter of the other in their otherness. This entails an apprehension and engagement of the other that does not reduce them to any possible role. They are not (merely) your debater, your interlocutor, your colleague, your drinking partner, your lover. They may be any of these, but no role or status encompasses the person-to-person encounter (face to face, head to head, body to body, soul to soul…), not even the status of life or death.

This highlights the temporally-stretched, open-ended, and constitutively incomplete dimension of friendship. The one-to-one is always its own dimension. Each one-to-one is incomparable to any other, because it cannot be reduced to functional roles or social norms. It entails the on-going meeting of “strangers,” which challenges in ever new ways. In this dimension, the other remains other, no matter the degree of understanding and familiarity gained. They are respected in their transcendence, in their otherness to themselves, in the strangeness of their idiom.[4] This respect is essential for friends to honor what is singular in each other—a singularity that each discovers in tandem.

Obviously, the encounter between two never guarantees friendship. It may just as likely lead to enmity, and perhaps a certain enmity is always risked. There will certainly be antagonism and disagreement, disappointment and even estrangement. There will be phases of intensity and phases of retreat, again with no guarantee that a former closeness can be revived at a later time. But friendship undergoes all this, the whole uncertainty of a life. Even when death asserts itself, the friend carries the friend. It says yes to the alterity of the other and goes with it. Its foundation is an affinity that goes beyond knowledge and words and which outlasts the lived worlds of the two.

IV

When friends think together, however, it is not only each other that they meet. They also meet what outlies them, what is other than them both. This brings me to the full definition of the second option.

Under the “conversation of thought” paradigm, the effort of philosophical exchange is to engage the “otherness of the other” in the one-to-one encounter, yes, but in light of the greater shared encounter with “the Other of both others”—the horizon of what-is-to-be-thought [das Zudenkende]. This place does not exist yet. It is what Celan called U-topia.

What this looks like in practice cannot be prescribed. It entails that each of the friends, on their own, are outstretched to this Other-horizon already somehow, so that when they meet together, it is on this Other-horizon that they think. Obviously, they cannot do so from within the bounds of what they already know or within the universe of discourses they have already spoken; rather they draw from these as they extend their offerings to the unknown Other they are underway toward.

When the Other-intended dimension of my thought meets the Other-intended dimension of your thought, we are engaged in a conversation that can be greater than any position we might already hold. We discover our possibilities most ripely there. We open ourselves to a free association of ideas and a free reception of input from the friend. We allow the scattering of trajectories, trusting that our alliance will be further formed in just this way. At the same time, we pursue our intuitions, we allow our obsessions to spill over, we enthuse and refuse, we spar and forget—all of this under the banner of the as-yet-unthought. In this nurturing heart of the other-to-Other, we make our way to cognizance of what precedes our very birth and which, discovering it, we know as if for the first time.

I wish to emphasize, in closing, that I am not saying this exchange must be about “the Other” as the “theme” for our thinking. This is not about discoursing on God. Anything could be the content of the exchange—ethics, aesthetics, religion, politics, social critique, etc. Again, I only intend to bring something formal to light.[5]

By speaking of an “Other-directed” thought, engaged through lifelong encounters with affinite friends who are themselves Other-directed and, in that directedness, wholly other to us, I wish simply to gesture toward that place “far outside” where we do not yet know what we will say, where the singularity we are is yet to become what it shall be, where the thought we are to think is not known, not articulated, not constructed, not yet conceived.

By the grace of friendship, we discover our own Other-directedness and nearer reach this place—we find ourselves—, since even our most singular statement is made in-common. Its wellspring is the community-without-community of friends in thoughtful conversation, who seem to have only each other, across the depths of the solitude that is theirs.

Endnotes:

[1] “Sind diese Wege nur Um-Wege, Umwege von dir zu dir? Aber es sind ja zugleich auch, unter wie vielen anderen Wegen, Wege, auf denen die Sprache stimmhaft wird, es sind Begegnungen, Wege einer Stimme zu einem wahrnehmenden Du, kreatürliche Wege, Daseinsentwürfe vielleicht, ein Sichvorausschicken zu sich selbst, auf der Suche nach sich selbst… Eine Art Heimkehr.” (Paul Celan, Meridian Speech)

[2] “Not merely a system of belief but their beliefs and their hearts living together” (Jack Spicer, “A Textbook of Poetry,” My Vocabulary Did This To Me, p. 306).

[3] The self has “always already preceded itself as other insofar as it is itself.” (Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus III, p. 9)

[4] Agamben’s “Idea of Love” could be cited here: “To live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent-so unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light in which that one being, that thing, remains forever exposed and sealed off.” (Idea of Prose, p. 61)

[5] Moreover, for Celan, as for Derrida, the Other cannot be predefined or thematized or preknown at all, for it is the horizon of these operations and their interrogation. “Other” stands for the event that, by definition, we cannot see coming: it may be the friend, it may be the disaster, it may be… The idiom to address it and render it cognizable, itself must travel a path through the contingent and de-/re-constructible. The poem searches for you through “you-darkness.” The Other’s unfigurability and unassumability, its happening-stance, is non-fungible. See my Due to the Other.