fragilekeys

Jeremy Fernando’s book, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death (2010), challenges all the usual assumptions about, and approaches to, the suicide bomber’s act and to what is at stake in it. Rather than simply dismissing it as “evil,” he tries to think through the call and response of the bomber’s death. Fernando refuses to write her off, and instead writes through her and her act, indeed, writes it/her himself. For the book is not only concerned with her act, but with the similarities between her act and his own: the act of thinking and of writing a book.

Fernando tells us, in a section set apart from the main chapters (as indicated by a different tone and font), “Confessions: a suicide note,” that the reasons behind his study are profoundly personal (185 ff.). He makes it clear that he has not forgotten the fact that people die because of the suicide bomber’s acts, and he takes full responsibility for “defending” her. But his reasons for doing so are clear: he wants to place, “thinking and the suicide bomber– next to each other,” because for him both are (nearly unthinkable) “events,” and both involve our “relationship” to death. Therefore both are irreducible and remain forever enigmatic. They are both impossible to describe, impossible to trace back to “causes,” impossible even to experience, and so impossible to “know about.” In both, what is at stake is a trauma that simply will not give us any good answers. Furthermore, both involve a relation to the other, or to otherness as such, which precedes the subject and her account: a relationality that no “code” or “Law” will ever decipher or exhaust. Both involve a form of communication, a “symbolic exchange,” which is “profitless,” which has nothing to do with information, motives, trades, reason, or logic, but rather with the “impossible”: the gift of death. This gift cannot be recounted, remembered, or inscribed; it can only challenge us. And so we can only try to respond, knowing that no response will ever be adequate.
Continue reading →

But no one can tame the tongue; it is a restless evil and full of deadly poison. —James 3:8

With the same tongue, we explode into argumentative rants, console the mourning, show others what we know, plead for sympathy, back-stab, make peace… The tongue puts on a show, or refuses to even whisper. Then it shouts, then it stutters, unsure of why it speaks. How does this thing– more intimate than we can tell– go so easily from confession to curse, seduction to condemnation? How do we allow it so much– repeating what it’s heard as if it were its own, talking over the other so as not to hear?

The tongue seems born to confuse. We’re talking before we know what a “word” is, we’re speaking and growing in our identity before we have any idea of who we are, before we’ve given any thought to what it is to “be.” It doesn’t demand anything from us, not the slightest care, not the least consideration: the tongue simply follows our desire– our desire to be desired, our desire to be recognized– in all its maddening ambiguity, its crass imitation, its immaturity and deceit. Just recall the awkward silence, the inopportune outburst, the mistimed word: does the tongue ever really know what it’s doing? is it ever quite certain who it speaks? Continue reading →

Ever and again comes the thought that what we see of a sign is only the outside of something within, in which the real operations of sense and meaning go on. ¹

We are again and again using this simile of something clicking or fitting, when really there is nothing that clicks or that fits anything.²

                                                               –Ludwig Wittgenstein

John Keats’ concept of “negative capability” suggests that dwelling in uncertainty, beyond justification or reason, is the key to the creation of a true aesthetic product. In this paper, I try to enact this concept while loosely circumnavigating what Wittgenstein says about the indefiniteness of our concept of inner speech, what it means to be a living being, and seeing (distinguished from “knowing”). The ultimate goal is to link this indefinite seeing with what I see as Wittgenstein’s non-prescriptive, aperspectival, ethical self-position. The concept of dwelling in (self-)uncertainty is linked to Wittgenstein’s various wonderments and insistences: that we ought to be puzzled by our sight, that we must not take it for granted that we know “how to see” or “how to read,” that we ought to be struck by motives for actions. This is akin to the various concepts Wittgenstein takes up at the end of his Philosophy of Psychology: the notion (which he enacts) of “imponderable evidence,” which convinces us of a picture’s genuineness non-argumentatively, through the subtleties of glance, gesture, and tone, and whose cause is only in its effect; the ability to learn correct “judgments” through experience and application, but which establish rules that are unlike calculating; and finally, this “indefiniteness” of expression itself, with which he struggles to picture his insights, always straddling the line between correct aesthetic expression and the potential that his ethical view is being distorted by it. This is why we “only occasionally” make fruitful connections; yet in this slow, uncertain trek, we develop our eye, our aesthetic/ethical judgment. In hope of enacting this type of “development,” I have tried to present a picture of my idea of the poetic, based on various insights from Wittgenstein’s ethical non-positioning. Continue reading →