fragilekeys

Potentionless, additionless, intentionless, possessionless, future-less, needless… less, less, less, that is the only key you ever found, it shuttered beneath all your proud statements, it was your faith (kindness, silence, servitude) neutralizing all your individual, until the last bad habit of Hell is eradicated from your “soul,” that is, your soul is eradicated, there is not even a trace of your heated prayers, your tender epiphanies, your naked heart moments in need of understanding and sense.

Time: the universe’s mending weep, music of beats changing, bases for happiness inverted and transformed—that you must imitate: the storm of forgiveness preempting judgment and the balancing of scales—Time no median mark but the immanence of the messianic: infinite smallness of self, instant, and trace left all quasi-indistinguishable, forming one “block” breaking the loops of worry and expectation and purpose—a deindividualization, the overflowing of the lived by faith: not in time or its powers, not in anything, but the nothing-of-the-world transited by faith, the “existence” we will have had in-One-in-the-last-instance—nothing but the insistence of the infinitely small, the radically immanent tininess of the universe indexed by a Messiah-subject who needn’t even disappear, whose entire and only being is prayer. The least of these: crystals of time choosing to believe in time’s truce, forestalling humanity’s anger, revealing the “empty tomb of grief”—imperceptible passion of the cleanse assumed, consuming whatever could be asked.

(The ultimate sorry is because “I did it.” May this hallucination be forgiven at last; that is the meaning of remembering the Sabbath. How happy we could be in-One, “without” desire, at the contact (One-in-One) with no forward to back, no word to pin in, no identity to obliterate—just the first given, without-givenness: the One-time of the blessing’s resemblance in-us. Never doubt that that contact with the non-temporal takes place. The eternity that is no beyond or outside or process has no characteristics; it is immanent, and there is no “only way” to its approach. There is no way for the one who seeks, but the one who “does not seek will be found” (Kafka). Forget the shell-shocked attempts and let-shudder, for this light trembling of love is the very character of the universe: such is the Messiah’s testimony.)

Temporality—where the self has to be, check its position, project feelers and test if it is—where the self tries to lose or attain itself but in truth simply misses all possessive occasions—temporality is really “after” eternity like an after-thought or an ability to make sense of the experience of eternity. It is temporality that fools us into viewing eternity as an indefinite length or as something that could only be what it is at the end or fullness of time(s). It seems like something keeps heaping up, the volume of an empty chalice increased to the exact proportion that it fills up to the brim. We conceive of this as a present fulfillment just as much as a coming one—thus is the present an immanent transition, or an accomplishment of history that loops back, affecting history and inciting it to consummation; or the present vanishes in the immanence of a radical past without transitions, and one tries to draw “back” from the present to this time called One or Immanental, as to a block of eternity. But what if the “linear flow of phenomena” were simply identical to an immanent eternity without temporality? Our conventions of language, the temporality it allows us to express, is then only occasional; regardless of its pressures, we know that in-One the division has no effect. The simulation of being-in-temporality need not be threatening or believed.

Temporalization—is for selves and the victors of history who cannot bear the immanence of eternity. To consider it through the language of testing (can you bear it?) is already to corrupt it and overdetermine the experience. What is there to bear if not the “no way forward, no way back” of an a priori contact with eternity—this one thing that it is worth believing in? The temporal being can always choose to see itself in-One or from radical immanence: its existence in eternity which it lives (loops and lines and spirals of temporality aside).

Yet it is not even necessary to say that the soul is all there is, since there is nothing apart from its eternal traipse. Isn’t eternity lived non-personally? There may be an interpretation that leads me to love how it has graced my life, but we know that this level is not absolute. Eternity is gratitude incarnate in a generic, “fleeting” state of the universe? It is the One that loves you in-One since you are the One-in-person without desires or cares or actions or a self to deal with or negate, to test or create ex nihilo. Who does not seek? What non-seeking is there but One-in-One? Quasi-immobile, nonacting, at rest, static: all metaphors for its operation on temporality, phenomenological descriptions of its experience when compared with being a self in the world. But that in no way excludes the possibility that it also be the highest passion of subjectivity or the highest poverty of a socius redeemed.

The self-consumption it seems I must undertake is simply occasioned on temporality and the self-bind it seems to institute and communicate, but which is devalued in immanence. Personal and social considerations may retain priority, but the One under-comes prior-to-priority. Will it forever be a struggle? Or will it be a weep and a surrender—the shudder of peace and entrance into heaven, the feeling of ascension in the appearance of departure? Heart of flesh, warmth of heart, the love of the loving and the loved: such is the prayer we must, because we can, trust. One-time is “enough,” forever enough.

Yet how can I resist wanting more? This is the paradox of being human: push on all the more strongly because the end has been witnessed or experienced, assumed at any rate. How shall I exist tomorrow when today I already exist in eternity? Only eternity can answer that question; everything we know muddies the perspective. The one certainty here is almost impossible to bear; the whole comportment is of trust or prayer. The kindness of humans starts and ends there, less one vulnerability, but without outcome, a pure means without end or salvation or recuperation in strength.

This is a screen-poem or a cinema-fiction about the imaginary number in quantum mechanics, the notion of subjectivity in images, and the virtuality of the lived.

Self-Constraints III
Notes on Non-Philosophy

Philosophy is the despair of loops, and one can observe this in very way it develops and reproduces itself. There is an incessant recursivity not only in the texts it produces but in its manner of propagation through institutions and norms of validation. It is the necessity of re-ference in general, reference to a precedent in thought or to a forbearer in thinking. Or, equally, reference to oneself as thinker or as a “fold” in thought and being.

Philosophy gives itself its own tradition and its context just as the self gives itself itself. As a system, it considers these “givens” to be absolute or as “really existing” in an unavoidable way. Already this presupposition ensnares one in a loop. Thus deconstruction, for example, can become a double strategy: on the one hand, undoing the dualities and contraries given by the tradition as inescapable, on the other hand, rewriting or restylizing those concepts in a way that sets sail for a different horizon, but one nonetheless forever partially shaped by the inescapable tradition (thematized under the priority, the precedence of the “trace” or of existence in general). Perhaps one would like to get outside the loop, but because it is assumed to be transcendentally given, as binding/unbinding, that outside can only continue to refer to that given – to the apparent present world, to the signifying chain, to the differential play of traces, to philosophical positions, etc. The despair is of that prison, the prison of proof and verification where “relevant thinking” is defined by its ability to translate the untranslateable, transmit the untransmittable, make the impossible possible, and so on. These are aporias philosophy can never exit and does not want to exit: without assuming these loops its very activity becomes inconsistent. (See a previous post on autocatalytic thinking for more on that.)

What philosophy assumes (even deconstruction) is an ipseity whose evidence is in whatever way incontrovertible. The critique of the “metaphysics of presence” really changes nothing about this; it only emphasizes that there is something about the self or the subject that is irreducible to presence, irreducible to its inscription in the signifying chain, irreducible to its role or place in the world, irreducible to its voice and appearance, irreducible perhaps even to its body, etc. Philosophy begins in Plato with a project of preparing the soul to be liberated upon leaving its body and, in a sense, it only modulates that theme, however much it comes to critique the soul-idea (witness in Agamben its return, proving with such elegance how little has changed). Contemporary philosophy reinvests the self by describing it as never-pre-constituted, as in-process, as sliding under, as vanishing mediator, as structured by a void or by trauma or a cut, as engaged in care of itself or in the construction of truths – as dying, in a process of release, and so on. Non-philosophy doesn’t take the time to survey all these options, but makes a global diagnosis under the heading of “double transcendence” and ultimately equates philosophy with this system of self centered around a self-relation that must always pass through some “third” dialectically or contradictorily, successfully (happiness or affirmation of the other) or stuck constantly in an impasse (melancholy or mourning the other).

Agamben elegantly addresses this irreducible “excess of self” (without psychology, which philosophy always smartly resists). The ‘third’ instance, wherein the self as “a relation relating itself to itself” is established, is not God (Kierkegaard) or Beyng (Heidegger), but the irredeemable world meant to be deactivated: through the undoing of its apparatuses, through its profanation in play, through its “virtuous” gesture, the self auto-constitutes a form-of-life (soul) that can never be supposed as pre-existing or pre-constituted; it comes about only through the use of bodies, languages, etc., as use-of-oneself. The following quote exhibits well the structure double transcendence:

The subject — like the author, like the life of the infamous man— is not something that can be directly attained as a substantial reality present in some place; on the contrary, it is what results from the encounter and from the hand-to-hand confrontation with the apparatuses in which it has been put — and has put itself — into play. For writing (any writing, not only the writing ‘ of the chancellors of the archive of infamy) is an apparatus too, and the history of human beings is perhaps nothing other than the hand-to-hand confrontation with the apparatuses they have produced — above all with language. And just as the author must remain unexpressed in the work while still attesting, in precisely this way, to his own irreducible presence, so must subjectivity show itself and increase its resistance at the point where its apparatuses capture it and put it into play. A subjectivity is produced where the living being, encountering language and putting itself into play in language without reserve, exhibits in a gesture the impossibility of its being reduced to this gesture. All the rest is psychology, and nowhere in psychology do we encounter anything like an ethical subject, a form of life. (Profanations, p. 72)

For non-philosophy the key operation with regard to transcendence is “abasement” and Laruelle is careful to insist that abasement is not a suppression, a negation, or an annihilation. There is no denial of the fact that empirically there are loops, repetitions, habits, patterns, and more broadly, no denial of the empirical fact that we experience ourselves as transcendent entities constituted not only by these loops but as constitutive of them (“loop makers”). What is abased, however, is the priority of these determinations from transcendence. “The abasement of double transcendence, passing from its doublet-form to its simple form, is distinguished from every excess of transcendence; it is a depotentialization.” This is a move toward the generic. To begin from radical immanence is to suspend the presupposed or assumed givenness of all the transcendentals, reducing them to their simple status as phenomena given-in-immanence, in a sense stripped of their background. This is not about finding some empty space where all the traces would be gotten rid of. It is not a strategy of meditation and clearing. Peace (from philosophy) is not added on. It is not an operation or an achievement, but rather a perspective geared toward a use of the philosophical materials and thus of the self (form-of-experience) and toward seeing can be done with the aporias rather than continuing to turn them over themselves: a practice of self in its simple form, not as a transcendence constantly redoubling over itself but as each time fallen-in-immanence, determined from immanence rather than by whatever is assumed to be given.

The radical commencement implied here is generic or transindividual without being intersubjective — it doesn’t return upon itself, it doesn’t pick up where it left off even where it seems to. In other words, the loops are of a broken symmetry with immanence. The loop-maker becomes a simple maker that loops not back over “itself” but over materials, from One-time-immanence, determining the loop as non-repetitive or non-recursive of self and thus as not really a loop at all. Or again, the chain is broken a priori without requiring the operation of a subject. Immanence means the impossibilization of every loop, i.e., the impossibilization of the loop-maker – but not in a way that would orient the loop-maker towards its own death, to the impossibility of its existence as its ownmost possibility, however this model is modulated – nor in the way of the barred self that, indicating an inherent lack in all systems, would be pushed about by the obscurity of the Other’s desire – nor by the way of a erotism (Bataille) or depersonalization along a line of flight (Deleuze). On the other hand, nothing about self-expression is off-limits per se; they are even recognized to be inevitable precisely as philosophy, as form-of-experience, as a mixture of a transcendental-empirical and a real-transcendental, but these materials or “givens” (Given-without-givenness) are seen-in-One, as a priori undivided and generic. Two consequences:

1. The self has its self-relation (double transcendence) undermined in-immanence. This does not happen “just once” as if it were a decision or a mystical dogma, but each time one time (an immanent impossibilization). One is tempted to call this the “instant” and we could recognize many philosophical avatars here: experiencing oneself eternal (Spinoza), the Augenblick at the portal of two eternities (Heidegger/Nietzsche), the instant of my death or of the gift of death (Blanchot/Derrida), moment of ecstasy or realization, etc. Non-philosophy recognizes in these solutions the continued priority of the present as the locus of appearing or life, as the locus then of the self in the World; this priority obtains even when the full presence of the present is somehow deferred, suspended, questioned by the Other, etc.  Non-philosophy responds with a distance of immanence: not of the present with itself (“time is out of joint”) (the self…), but a more radical distance of the non-relation of the Real to the present, from the “distance” of the Last Instance (not death, not the “end of self,” etc…). The experience of this instant qua self as present is seen-in-One and thus as a sort of hallucination, a contingent phenomenal given or system of knowledge which can be given a different use, this time no longer in the name of a thinker or a signature, but in defense of radical immanence “itself,” which never comes from the present but comes each time one time “under” it.
2. The subject is then seen as a clone of-the-World, an objective appearance no longer believed but dealt with as a Stranger-existing-subject, a sort of hallucination of-the-Last-Instance.

What is observed here is the non-relation of the subject to the Real, the non-reciprocity of all these transcendental productions to the Real, and how in the last instance the Real under-determines the subject, the loops and productions, not so much stripping them of transcendence but forcing them simply as fallen in-immanence. One may have capacities, one may have knowledge, but where or from when does one practice them? To where are these transcendences and subjectivities pro-jected? Non-philosophy answers: from immanence, the ject from Nowhere and Nowhen, and it seeks to draw consequences from its under-determining influence or effect (messianity).