fragilekeys

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

The first is the advancement and defense of positions, the contestation of ideas and interpretations, the debate between commitments and belief systems. The second 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 on the opposition of ‘this side’ versus ‘that side’. It fosters the partisan attitudes of atheist vs believer, liberal vs 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—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, its aim is to strengthen itself and to 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.

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My article “Doing (the) Nothing: Eric Santner and Giorgio Agamben on Suspending the Apparatus of Glory” was recently published on Epoche Magazine. My thanks to Timofei and John over there for continuing to support my work. Make sure to check out the other writings– it’s quite the archive of philosophy by now at issue #67! Here is an excerpt from section IV:

As creatures made up of spectral flesh, we feel more than just the pressure to uphold the norms of social life corresponding to our role and placement in it. We also feel the pressure of the void around which these norms orbit, “the lack of any ultimate grounding or authorization of those normative statuses,” and increasingly we feel the precarity and dispensability of our roles (84). But this void is terrifying. Exposed to it, our world threatens to fall apart. Santner calls formations of the flesh the ways in which this “ontological vulnerability” is covered up (92). The King covered this void in two ways: by veiling it (this is the immediate effect of the glorious body: to captivate) and by vouching for it (by backing whatever debt in the justification of society was outstanding). With the deposition of royal sovereignty, this function of veiling and vouching spreads itself across the whole fabric of the social, such that captivation and justification becomes an immanent practice, as we’ve seen. The “subject-matter” of the modern citizen-subject directly involves these formations of the flesh which labor over the legitimacy of those forms, for it is now the People’s body that must function “as glorious guarantor covering the missing link at the ‘anthropogenetic’ knotting of the somatic and the normative” (86).

Political economy thus pertains to the maintenance of the People’s Two Bodies: not just material life (the management of biological life and death) but also spectral life (the glory and spectacle of its symbolic, undead body). It inherits the duty to vouch for the normative order and its suture to the somatic, and thus to “redeem or indemnify” a lack at its origin (88). Biopolitics doesn’t just address man as species and population, but also in this dimension of flesh as the bearer of royal remains, for “the threshold of modernity is marked by the ‘massification’ of the physical-juridical flesh of the king, its dispersion into populations that for that very reason must be placed in the care of biopolitical administration” (89). Biopolitics, on this level, is the regime that justifies veils over the void and securitizes or funds them. Foucault even showed in his genealogical analyses that policing was originally conceived as, “the art of the state’s splendor as visible order and manifest force”: not just the maintenance of rule but the maintenance of glory (91). What appears to be “policing of empirical bodies and forces” conceals its liturgical dimension, for this often violent administration is also responsible for covering the void upon which social existence is built. Still, it is not just the police but every political subject who inherits responsibility for the People’s second body. All of us have a hand in it, for it is at stake in our own. This is what weighs upon us uncannily: the production and shaping of the glorious flesh of the social bond (99), the imperative to care for this “spectral flesh of the sovereign People” (86). To become more aware of these veilings and vouchings, especially as they have enmeshed our own flesh into unfreedom, is therefore a biopolitical task that is as critical as it is intimate. Continue reading!

Letter to John

Part III
1. Poems

WISEACRE / WISDOM TICKET

At the limit of the query in the real,
every certainty fails. The dispersal of all energy
prevails        as one sparse detached resolution
deriving the antithesis of death
from the ruination of all persistent illusions.
Only the quest to love and one’s insufficiency to love
sustains        once images of God
no longer avail the heart surrendered
fatally to the talisman-stripped openness
it must embark.        And the stations of the self,
remember: they quit the self: not a single
shred of self-evidence is left once
the zero is indwelt, zero that is plenum as well:
the confect of its beam within the dazzling darkness
the night which spells the culmination of the faith
the pristine corporal sensoration of
a consciousness        mandala-immense
rippling waves of Suchness with a sea-infocused core
O this rife, ripe, intangible common sense!

And yet still        I cannot erase        quickly enough
these impressions I am dreamily impelling
from my non-sight          this ignorant
allegiance to the bottomed-out
nakedness I kept on
confessing for the truth        because I may confuse it to confess:
because within my diamond cut of faulty gratitude
only the vast agency of
dynamic spaciousness insists
the non-recursive playfulness of cancelled signs
the lullabying quiver of the phantom
dissipated for all sentients by the simplest thud:
for that is where the ease of sky
probes every wanderer’s right under the sun
to let it roll       without horizon lines       into the quick.

See now I am like Icarus        whose flames desert
a theologian divested of his tomes
a negligible worker whose lumbering intent
descends       stumbling from the precipice
nowhere to reach nowhere to
rest content in the unfathomable wealth
pure presence manifests         questionless—
but who could reach the depth I splash from then?
when it is but the surface pressure of
an all-eroding safety       content to soak the trees.

The past I cannot foresay        the present
relinquishes me long before I learn my speech
my fidelity therefore must lodge
somewhere in the salt floe of the vagabond
Jesus, but he without a chance
of being understood        who pitilessly
tears in two the temple veils
until body alone ascends of future glory
which can no longer be reserved for anything but
his gory heart:         future that inexorably
demands of the liberated conscience it be enough
since there is nothing left to live by but         lost love.

—May 30th, 2023

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