fragilekeys

My longing for truth was one single prayer. –Edith Stein

In response to the simple but essential question, how do you know what sources to trust?, the easiest and best answer is: trust your gut. In the beginning, of course, one has to get a feel for sniffing out snakes and fakes–people who have “run out of holy spirit” and so “speak in mechanical tongues,” as Adorno put it; those whose motives are corrupted in whatever way, who spread bloated truths or spinelessly pontificate, or who belabor and bore with numberless stalls and equivocations. But, by trusting, one is soon led away from all the drones and boosters. Soon one finds only those spirited souls who do not want anything for themselves–who basically don’t need to appear, and if they must only lend weight to human-generic potentiality, letting an impersonal light shine through. Beyond that, trust those who are trusted by those you trust–look up the steady influences and loves, draw the useful comparisons, follow the trails and mark out new ones, connect all the dots only you could spot. Do not trust councils and authorities or too much established doxa, but complete humans–especially those who had a taste for solitude, for they will be honest about the real difficulties. Incapable of mishandling any inquisitive eye, they will quicken vision to the point of the actively-creative truth, revealing their generative impulse to the aspirant, which is surely the hope of every genuine soul.

More interesting than learning correct knowledge is discovering what creative things can be done with knowledge. I value reference to tradition, but not as highly as innovation. I lay the most importance upon works that have a high “testament” quality: when one can tell that a soul has unceasingly poured itself out into its work, in abandon and in care, even if this means confusion and contradiction all along the way. To testify to an ordeal is better than to give answers, especially when it comes to the “spiritual.” Thus I view with equal credibility Simone Weil, who drove her religion to the physical extreme, and Antonin Artaud, who did the same with his atheism and rejection of God. Both understood the need to upturn the normal modes of thought and action in man, and that philosophy, religion, mythology, theater, and prayer had to be used in novel ways to achieve this end and to spur this development. When it comes to the soul–not objective theories about what the soul “is,” its place in the cosmos, its relation to God, or anything that would adequate it through knowledge, but to our soul, the monument at stake in all our psyche–both offer indispensible testimonies. It is worthwhile to engage and deem credible all the colors of this spectrum, from Merton to Cioran, Wei Wu Wei to Tzara. Regardless of where one ends up, one is strengthened by this exposure and better understands one’s own doubts, as well as all the openings for novel rumination.

There is a form of engagement that goes beyond close reading, attentive examination, and the tireless suspension of certainty that is required to touch the body of any other thinker. What exceeds and fulfills this is a more complicated, incohate form: experimenting-with. To experiment-with is to let one’s mind and habits be fundamentally altered, if only for a time, by another thinker and their worries, to adopt not only their terms and concepts, but also their outlook and temperment, and thus to befriend them, to share a form-of-life and a common world of concern. But even the word “experiment” is inadequate here, for it could imply a controlled set-up with known parameters and variables, a mere test that could run its course and end back at a neutral state, with only some conclusions or “findings” deduced. Whereas here there is no return to origin. Setting aside any objective or critical distance, you must let the other leave direct some traces in your life-world, your moves and your memory, by entering or even mimicing their ordeal as best you can, of course in the compass of your own constraints and freedoms.

To become a credible witness, to verify the source as credible, to discern sources that are credible–those sources that alone can lead you to yours–one must follow. To follow is, “to give oneself up to the same trial, to the same derangement,” as Bataille says regarding his quest for community with Nietzsche. If it is Lacan you are reading, you will know you are being trained as an analyst; if it is Kierkegaard, you will be sure your training is in Christianity; if it is Laruelle, you will be sure you are becoming a non-philosopher. There is no other way to pursue a lived thought through to its consequences than to let it derail you, shift you, change not only your identity but your basic horizon. In this way you carry the other with you and everything they carried with them. Then your body remembers them and what they sought to transmit. Translating and transforming it, you absorb it in an unconscious, physical way. You are generated, yet another alterity. Of course, one must choose good companions along this journey, but it is not a matter of picking the perfect leader or the right system. This is an appretenticeship in a vocation without preexisting form–an adventure into a world never yet born.  It is an imitation without original, a variation on a melody not yet played. It leads one closer to oneself, by leading astray. By following, one learns what it means for one to believe. Perhaps it even makes one worth following for a while: credible.

What Nietzsche says of the New Testament–that it is advisable to read it with gloves on–is therefore good advice regarding all texts, ancient or new. Never forget that even sacred texts were written and chosen in human, all-too-human ways, and nothing about their provenance or their arrangement is to be deemed heaven-sent. One look at the apocryphal Gospels of Philip or Thomas, which exceed the Synoptic account in profundity and intensity, will convince you of that. Like any group seeking worshippers, subscribers, and never wanting to empower solitary followers–a church seeks cohesion in doctrine and structure, thus reproducing a monotonous homogeneity in thought and practice. Because of the risk they pose to its foundations, it has to torch the heretics who give simpler and more elegant visions and explanations than it ever could. With these sorts of groups, which include anything from academia to revolutionary parties–for these too are ‘sources’ that aspire to credibility–it is good to maintain a cool distrust. Likewise with all big structures and mindsets that seek unification, for they inevitably clash with the instauration of the complete human. On the other hand, when it comes to basics, “unity” and agreement can often be found easily, without nit-picking overly and with the simple goal of upbuilding the general spirit. Usually in public that is all that is needed: to ally oneself with the causes worth following and lend them the support of one’s voice and reason. Obviously occasions affect the urgency of this support and its volume, but at bottom one must still trust one’s gut and not react out of compunction.

When it comes to one’s own yearnings and need for soul-satisfaction, it will forever be necessary to dig beyond the level accessible to committees and thinktanks. It will forever be necessary to make form. The good in the world calls for it, as Frost reminds us. Luckily, all of poetry, art, philosophy, and science is there to keep one busy, free of the mediocre and boring. What one can learn from the Bible and other mainstream sources must be supplemented with the strange outliers and exceptions, which is where their truth is to be found; they must be complexified to match one’s own endeavor in the making of form, without worrying if this straying might be perceived as a transgressive, sacreligious, or disrespectful. Rather, one must learn to trust these secret interpretations that, in a way, remain secret even to oneself. It is enough to not be ungracious in listening, and to follow the trail.

What is a credible source? Although it will surely transmit a well-founded knowledge, it is important to situate that knowledge within the context of its emergence. I have tried to argue that knowledge is inseparable from its testamentary value, and this substantially so. To put it another way, the production of knowledge must be a pleasure for the soul–a creative labor of love. Thereby it retains the traces of its ordeal, though this does not make it “subjective” or expressive of an enclosed identity. Rather, it bears the mark of a solitary passage, of an exposed experience traversing the limits of the possible. Beyond all the ends to which knowledge can be put, in the last analysis it must at least also attest to the faith that makes it supportable, that sustains it through unknowns and pivots, that haunts its bearer even beyond their tolerance of abandonment, and destines them to a truth and a movement that could never once be called their “own.”

Faith and understanding are of heterogeneous orders. While action should be informed by what is known, there is always a leap that goes beyond knowledge and entrusts our fate to the unknown. It leads us to follow our lead, to believe in a destination that does not yet exist. This of course leaves us on guard with ourselves, since we can never be sure we’re headed in the right direction; moreover, there isn’t one until we’re traveling it, and perhaps the best direction is one defined by permanent reroute. Still, it is undeniable that a sense of “being-carried” is often there. I believe this is called grace–lightness in distress, clarity in confusion, bestowal at the impasse. Here, one is possessed rather than possessing, had rather than having. One is pushed, seduced, seized into new being. Recall how Paul confessed, “I do not yet consider myself to have taken hold of it,” that is, of the very thing that has already so strongly taken hold of him, “But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead…” (Phil 3:13).

What can be credited–what can be followed–always surprises freshly. It changes with each act of creativity that follows from the last. Even the slightest achievement in making form, “must stroke faith the right way,” Frost also tells us. But we have to be very resolute participants in this quest, impervious to a great many distractions, including all the bumpers that would redirect us back to the central track. Often we fail in perseverance and lack the requisite gravitas, the temerity of the prodigous. But we can trust that we can begin again anywhere, that our faith in the instant of renewed creation is never blocked off from us; that we begin open to it, or are already opening on to it, wherever we might begin.

Radical constructivism begins from the assumption, as philosophers since Kant often do, that there is an essentially unbridgable gap between the knowing subject and the external world and that, because this gap is always mediated by fallible sense organs and imperfect cognitive structures, there can be no representation of the world that matches it perfectly, only approximations that more or less “fit.” Thus the outside world remains unknowable, and focus is turned toward the processes of knowing, the adaptation of the knower to its environment, how each knower filters what they receive from the world through the lens of their own structurations of experience, and so on. Taking Ernst von Glaserfeld’s “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism” (pdf) as exemplary of this approach, I would like to briefly bring it into contact with some basic tenets of non-philosophy and in this way clarify some of its points. How do the two differ?

1) Division. Glaserfeld writes, “our knowledge can never be interpreted as a picture or representation of that real world, but only as a key that unlocks possible paths for us.” Statements like this assume a stance of defeat (false humility?), but in fact they only register the defeat of a certain type of knowledge. Here there is an abyss between absolute reality out there somewhere and our experience or representation of it, where this abyss is assumed to be absolute. For Laruelle, this abyss or “epistemo-logical” distance already presumes too much–a division between Man and the Real, instead of thinking them in their immanent radical identity. This distance, yet another version of the originary ‘fall’, sets thought on a hopeless trajectory to recover the supposedly lost unity of inside and outside, internal and external. But this assumed constraint remains unperceived. To begin instead not only from the Undivided, but from its immanence, the Real-One, implies another sort of experience, a different treatment of the human Lived.

According to the axioms of non-philosophy, Man is in-One before being–before being the subject of knowledge or experience, and so before being-in-the-world or being-in-philosophy–before being divided into self-world, ego-self, or any of the other doublets that the technology of division can generate. Furthermore, the One is immanent without being mediated by anything whatsoever (knowledge, traces, history, cognitive structures, objects, matter…). Glaserfeld wants to focus on, “how cognitive structures or knowledge might be related to an ontological world beyond our experience.” But what if this division between intelligence and environment already credits intelligence with too much? This search for correspondence overlooks that this very search roots itself in the Real. As does the constantly repeated operation of division, though in spite of itself. Through a somewhat naive reference to spontaneous selfhood, intelligence divides itself off from the external world, forming a face-to-face between it and itself. Non-philosophy, on the contrary, presumes given the immanent One, without any inherent opposition and thus forming but “one face” with the Lived.

2) Axiomatics. Too little attention is paid to Laruelle’s explicitly non-philosophical use of language. He is trying to import into philosophy a more scientific usage of symbols that would be “without logos,” that would not suffer through the procedures of nomination and sufficient definition that lead philosophy to constantly legitimate its own linguistic decisions. More deeply, non-philosophy begins one time each time from the Real as without-logos, as without needing to pass through knowledge and its structures, which therefore can take nothing away from it or add anything to it. The issue is to invent a use of language that could model or “clone” this silence of the Real, though without presuming to generate this silence qua discourse. The axiomatic approach that Laruelle adopts is based on the mere adequacy of “first terms,” not on the approximation of concepts to intuitions, or cognitive structures to those of the presumed-external world. These first terms (Real, Man-in-Person, etc.) do not “designate” anything, they do not indicate or “name,” not even to the extent that Glaserfeld still believes he can refer to perceptual objects, cognition, etc. It is also wrong to ask what sort of knowledge these first names make possible – there’s no increase here, no development, only less arbitrary or more rigorous descriptions or modelizations of immanence, which is indifferent to those descriptions though not hampered by them.

3) Epistemology. For the Real is sufficient unto itself without being named, thought, acted upon, known, or related to us. Such a “vision” is quite different from the constructivist view, which stops half-way when recognizing the insufficiency of knowledge or experience-based constructions. It stops because it contents itself with a give-and-take between knowledge and the world, continuing to search for criteria to decide if the image it creates is a decent “fit” or not, continuing to obsess over the individual’s subjective tainting of the images. Non-philosophy sees all this “conceptualization” in a relation of unilateral duality with the Real. It acknowledges that all (including scientific) thought is on the ‘side’ of the transcendental and does not reciprocally affect immanence. Here it is close to the modesty of the radical constructivist, but there are not two sides, no opposition but only “one face” of the Real, such that what appears on the ‘transcendental side’ (that of thought, representation) is inseparable from it, caused by it, determined by it in the last instance. For the immanent real is without transcendence, and whatever transcendence there is has a priori fallen in-immanence, has been brought down or weakened in it. Thought is thereby open to countless experimentations because all its inventions are seen to be caused, though only in the last instance, by the Real and to have their radical identity in-One.

What is at issue here is not so much the insufficiency of our knowledges (yet another critical, falsely humble warning), but the sufficient “knowing” of the Real that we are without knowing it – of a Real which is radically foreclosed to thought, yet discovered without effort, without imagination, without searching for it, in-immanence. Non-philosophy tries to model this nonlearned “cognizance” of immanence (a priori peace…) as that which needs no ‘second step’ through philosophy or discourse (i.e., through cognitive structures, through adapted experience, etc.) to be known. It is an immanent gnosis, the Real-in-person: “The genericity of man is to be a knowledge that does not itself ‘know’, a Lived which is thus not reflexive and cumulative” (1). Reversing the epistemo-logical hierarchy, non-philosophy is thus non-epistemological in principle: it invents with or from the Real as the already-Discovered, rather than assuming a division that must falteringly rediscover its outside-opposite, mediating it through the structures of experience and negotiating it through decisions of knowledge – everything which has to do with the philosophical subject and the “I” as center of representation.

4) The Real. Non-philosophy is therefore given the Real without any operation of donation or givenness, and thus non-phenomenologically (not in reference to a presumed-transcendental self) and non-ontologically (not in connection to any perceived topology or configuration of beings). The Real is not reducible or comparable to anything we would call “reality,” nor does it refer to some state of being of the world out there. On the contrary, it is precisely this ontic-ontological determination that the Real under-determines radically and immanently, rendering it itself undecided or indeterminate. So whereas philosophy and constructivism assume something ‘out there’ that experience must go to, non-philosophy sees the Real-One immanent ‘prior’ to experience, even though they form one-face or one “front” with it (a unilateral duality). This has the added consequence that experience itself, the Lived affect, is a priori broken from the circuit of self-reference and auto-affectivity, from the psychologism of atomic individualities that Glaserfeld has to embrace (for example when he writes, “I alone can take the responsibility for what is being said on these pages,” exposing another aspect of spontaneous philoosophy). The Lived is instead without circularity, without reference to a Mind or a Life, without what Laruelle calls “double transcendence” (a transcendent self standing out of the world’s transcendence). The Lived is instead taken axiomatically to be in-One and thus generic, of one face or one “jet” with the immanent Real (think the front of an ocean wave, the tip of a stream). We might say that, one time each time, the Real is the non-“realistic” surprise to reality, a surprise that sub-venes or is in precession over any construction, un-doing or under-doing it, and with it undermining the World as such – and this includes its apparatus of reception, the so-called “experiencing subject.” [To better describe this surprise turn of “under-determination,” the non-standard phase of nonphilosophy speaks of the immanent Real as wavelike (as opposed to corpuscular, which is clearly Glaserfeld’s orientation insofar as judgments about objects of perception remain his concern) and as virtual or futural, as constantly in-flux (the quantic clinamen), but without ever being redoubled into a self or flattened out into a plane.]

5) Decision. One quote from Glaserfeld shows how much priority he places on this aspect: “decisions determine what is to be categorized as ‘existing’ unitary objects and what as relationships between them. Through these determinations, the experiencing consciousness creates structure in the flow of its experience. And that structure is what conscious cognitive organisms experience as ‘reality’.” We should once again note the extreme credit given to the cognitively-informed structuration of experience – as if because thought stepped in somewhere, the Real somehow needed to step out for good! But how could that be? Isn’t this expulsion just a sign that thought would like to remain in control of everything – holding it at a distance all the more certain because so cautious and non-‘idealistic’? Whereas the constructivist still thinks he needs a picture of reality (and must impose a distance of meditation through imagination no matter what), the non-philosopher sees or “knows” the Real to be Given-without-giveness, without needing pictures or constructs or any form of mediation whatsoever (=Vision-in-One). Of course this forces a change in how we view and use language and images, but it is not a matter of imposing new restrictions, skepticisms, or paranoias about our thought’s “insufficiency.” The Principle of Sufficient Philosophy fails not simply because of its hubris in trying to over-determine the Real, in assuming that it can decide what the Real “is.” Nor is it because it dooms itself, through its false humility, to the gradual process of constructing, with its own meager devices, a “more or less reliable world.” It also fails because the Real is an instance that is sufficient prior to thought’s workings – prior to being, prior to logos, before philosophy is even entered – indeed the Real is foreclosed to these, and thus likewise is Man. There is a Laruellean parody of Latour here: “we have never been philosophers,” but only generic-humans. Whereas the radical constructivist, with his obsession with the mediation of cognition and his insistence upon the absolute division between Man and the Real, cannot help but continue to philosophize in despair of itself and “adapt” itself to the so-called sufficient external World of beings, etc…

When Glaserfeld, summing up the dilemma posed to the radical constructivist, writes that, “the ‘real’ world manifests itself exclusively there where our constructions break down,” he takes up a position we could compare with Zizeks’s notion of the Real as the immanent impasse of symbolization, the supra-discursive “rupture or gap which makes the order of discourses always and constitutively inconsistent and non-totalizable”(2). This is again symptomatic of the All/not-All cage philosophers continually trap themselves in (itself based on an unperceived logocentrism without bounds). As if the only solution to the trap was to find the right ‘keys’, to pound away at those we already have, progressing forward without ever dreaming of escaping (the constructivist’s case), or to smack the lock with a sufficiently powerful hammer, to embody this point of pure antagonism as subject (Zizek’s case). Non-philosophy, on the contrary, does not just “aim” to release us from this cage (the world-form); it starts axiomatically from the (non-discursive) Real-One as a priori “subtracted-without-subtraction” from that cage, from the immanence of a (material) subtracted from the World-capture. It is not necessary to drive our constructions to a breaking-point, to torture our language and ourselves, to thrust ourselves into decisions that make us despair or tear us apart, or to force any sort of intentional operation whatsoever, to attain the Real or come closer to attaining it. Indeed, it is nothing to “attain” at all, unless we want it to be what we want it to be, which of course isn’t the Real but its hallucination. For non-philosophy, the Real is rather given-without-givenness one time each time prior to… X.

What distinguishes non-philosophy is that it is not an acquisition of knowledge with regard to what we don’t know, but a defense of the knowing of the Real that we are without knowing it. To this end, it puts to work a generic use of knowledges for the sake of “producing” this we-don’t-know-it (the Future-in-person): “To produce the unknown with the known rather than the known with the unknown—such is the operation of the generic matrix…” (3). There is no imposed modesty of knowledge here; the epistemo-logical hierarchy is simply inverted by the immanence of the Real, which is foreclosed to it. Nor is there any need to admit that our models must fail, leading to slow modifications constrained by our previous steps and dooming us to alienation. There is rather an imperative to invent an existence in the Real without knowing the destination of our invention beforehand, and without letting it be constrained by any All whatsoever. This lived knowledge “of” (caused by) the Real, this “real primary knowledge,” is not taught to us, but practiced.

(1) Laruelle, Francois. The Speculative Turn. p. 250.
(2) Zizek, Slavoj. The Speculative Turn. p. 409.
(3) Laruelle, Francois. Christo-Fiction. p. 61.

[Note: special thanks to Matthias Mauderer on the Francois Laruelle Facebook page for posing the question about non-philosophy’s relation to radical constructivism. This text is a modified version of my original response to his question.]

My research into the Messiah-idea has led me to some strange conclusions and paradoxes. I have come to reject without reservation what I call the “one-man hypothesis”: the idea that the Messiah could be one singular flesh and blood person who would “accomplish” salvation for all for all time, who would be the direct representative of God on earth, who was uniquely chosen according to a plan of salvation, and so on. This hypothesis fails in two basic directions–either the actuality of the Messiah becomes impossible and demands an interminable waiting upon his ever-deferred arrival (roughly the Judaic view), or “one man” is elevated to the status of God-Man and latched onto with unwavering belief, an attachment that, in order to be sustained, demans extreme religious idolization and/or a culture of glorification.

As our secularized Christmas rituals demonstrate, the second option has no problem cozying up to the powers of this world: money, consumerism, materialism, hierarchies, churches, etc. This is not a knock against Christmas, just an acknowledgement that, in most cases, little thought is given to the birth of the Messiah or what it might mean. In that sense, the first option–a waiting that spans the duration of a life–is infinitely preferable, because then at least the question is kept alive–what is the Messiah and what would its coming mean?–a question that, in my view, can and should be exported from its religious heritage and repurposed for a new use,  for a generic humanity that is radically unaffiliated and undefined.

Following a number of thinkers, it thus proved useful to isolate something like “messianity” from out of the religious complex of confusions and mystifications. Messianity can be conceived along the same lines as “humanity,” modifying it or even replacing it. A continual rebirth that surprises us each time, that introduces a profound indetermination into our being, that frees us from the anxiety produced by judgments, predicates, and categories, and that thereby leaves us in peace. In this way, the transformative potential of the Messiah-idea is retained without getting hung up on famous persons, fantasies of divine glory, and dogmatic hierarchies between beings of whatever sort.

(N.B., Jesus’ duplicity is this: although he rightly emphasizes the lowly and humble and the love that they as victims of the world can share, he nonetheless maintains for himself and the Father the necessity of worship and adoration. Simply asserting that his Kingdom is not earthly but celestial does nothing to challenge the logic of lordship and slavery; nor the fetishization, if not of riches, then at least of superiority and regality; nor the central place of the “will” in the economy of action. Sovereignty is suspended or emptied out only to be lifted up, etherealized as heavenly, sublimated in an interior dominion. The challenge he wished to pose to authority was thus doomed to fail through a thousand compromises with earthly power–cf. Roman Empire, contemporary religious conservativism, etc. The messianic break then becomes, on average, just another leveraging tool in the power game. Because glory itself is never interrogated, the core of the messianic message gets lost.)

So, instead of focusing our attention on the exceptional status of one-man (King, Savior, Priest), what if we sought the source and reality of salvation in the “ordinary messiahs” that we are? As suggested above, this would mean focusing on the love that victims of the world manifest for each other, their immanent mode of “overcoming” world-oppression, which love does not so much eliminate as place in a margin or render “neglectible.” A justice that is not retaliatory, but compassionate, attending to the “last,” not the first. A  (non-)activism that does not once again become the puppet of power (of representation, of the will, of duties and commandments, of morality, etc.), but instead assumes the position of any-victim, both undergoing the world and “causing” or letting it go under. It is capable of resisting not just some given object or situation in the world (which provides only the occasion), but the world-form itself, disempowering it and bringing it down. This is the weak power of messianity as a priori defense of humans from the harassment of the world (my interpretation of John 16:33).

This is also probably what the Christmas holiday, despite its perversions, retains: its orientation toward “loved-ones” (where there is still exceptionality, but now it is ordinary, without need of universalization or elevation; it is there only in finite, mortal, singular manifestations); its ability to reconnect us with our own histories in a way we usually overlook, to imbue us with a feeling of generational continuity; its silent and snowy landscape of inactivity and simplicity, lacking any imperative to “do” anything–these are all experiences of eternity proper to ordinary messianity. On this day, the world is supposed to disappear, a message of peace on earth is supposed to reign, and we feel compelled to overlook the minor differences and disputes that have accumulated over the year–to love, forgive, enjoy our common presence, and be thankful for whatever blessings we may have. Beginning with the lived, and with the dead we carry with us in it, thanks to it.

There are of course other things to emphasize about messianity, but in a sense it all comes down to the ordinariness and simplicity of the lived, its power to “bring down” the big structures and strictures of the world–to cherish the local, one says, to dwell in the heart, says another, to credit the meek with the inheritance of the earth, says yet another. All these metaphors are subject to abuse, as is the salutation Merry Christmas. Well, Merry Christmas anyway. May you continually resume the messianity in your human, and find peace in the immanent rebirth.

Timothy Lavenz
Christmas 2016