I think I'm more struck by our inexhaustible search for contiguity than by how trapped we are (injustice isn't merely conjoined with the cage of oppression; or rather, oppression isn't merely a cage). What Freud calls displacement. "Desires are constantly displaced": this seems a constant mode of capitalistic suffering and happiness. We go to the next best thing. This is the metonymic relation: we cannot have the body, so we choose the hands, or fingers, or chest, or torso, or....or... Jesus, in his brilliance, reverses this: "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it out; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell" (Matthew 5:29, KJV). The body cannot offend you: only these contiguities, these associations.
Why suffering and happiness? Because we misread this displacement and make it metaphorical: "I will have it later" or "This lack is a sign!" This is how we get happy; how we feel us getting stronger; our passion grows this way, for some reason. Indeed, suffering itself, as Marx says, is a kind of pleasure: we consume it, it becomes ours. It defines our happiness, in a sense, within the capitalist system of lack and possession: happiness must be attained, gotten, had, possessed, consumed, like capital itself, which is defined in its quest for consuming more capital. The goal: to become a body without organs.
Is this where we are left?
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
The Force of Writing
"What we have tried to show in following the connecting thread of the 'dangerous supplement' is that in what we call the real life of these 'flesh and blood' creatures,...there has never been anything but writing, there have never been anything but supplements and substitutional significations which could only arise in a chain of differential relations."
-- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [Tr. Gayatri Spivak. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), p. 158]
She is my truth, supposing, as Nietzsche does, that she must be seduced. Brought into life through my life, she is my reality, my truth, the feeling of the real, and thus the feeling of pleasure as if it is being forced upon me. As if: this possibility, this metaphor, the introduction of writing: her play, the long chain of supplements and substitutions. She enters and leaves through a doorway that folds into other doorways, and other ones, without pause, which is only itself a pause -- the play of an ellipsis...
Writing writes -- the supplement supplements -- the trace traces: such an active field of forces, becoming intimate -- that is, on the one hand, the becoming-inward of an outward interaction and, on the other hand, the becoming-outward of an inward pleasure. In other words, within this active field or relation of forces -- the scene, or rather production, of writing -- is perhaps where intimacy is born(e), is produced or carried across an infinite field of power. Intimacy is then the product of writing, the product of substitutions and mediations, forces acting upon one another, taking over one another, instituting and removing different paradigms: intimacy with the other, she, my truth becoming-fantasy or my fantasy becoming-real, begins with this writing, this paper, my hand...
I will perhaps be criticized for this: that it is writing which allows this intimacy with the other, with her; that my other is necessarily gendered, excluding from sight the whole field of intimate relations which produce, even if secretly, a kind of homo-eroticism; that I will have affirmed an intimacy that is saturated with mediations upon mediations. For how can truth ever be reached that way? Is this not precisely un-realistic, that is, un-pragmatic, having to do with nothing important, significant, in the world? An expression somewhat of madness or delirium or pointless walks down unnecessary roads? Wasted energies?
I must leave these questions unanswered. Not simply because a choice or decision has been made to "abandon all hope," but because responding to them will only push me to defend a thesis that, in my opinion, is indefensible. Unjustifiable, in a sense. That my world must always start anew, under a new name, a new position, a new state, yet by an image that is always signifying the past, like the light from a very distant star -- this cannot be justified under writing here. To those that say I am too romantic or too idealistic or too un-realistic, I cannot respond, and thus lie in my irresponsibility.
On the other hand, it seems the main thrust of this unjustifiability lies in an impossible configuration of the criticisms at hand: how are they to formulate the problem in any other way? This might perhaps point towards the truthfulness of the problem; but in a very simple way, it also points to the problem's extreme narrowness: the inability to formulate it in any other way is an attestation of its weakness, it's powerlessness, it's inability to justify itself outside of itself, a reliance on the power of repetition to reveal somehow the truth of the world (is this not the definition of madness?)...No, I will not go that route, then; my route is troublesome enough.
The force of writing is perhaps the production of intimacy: that feeling of pleasure being almost forced upon you, a suffering of the real, in a sense, since the real is never something that one predicts to bring you suffering. Is not all this the literary life, a life made up of literature, of a narrative that is already being written, of a writing already signifying the death of a star, its supernova?
-- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [Tr. Gayatri Spivak. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), p. 158]
She is my truth, supposing, as Nietzsche does, that she must be seduced. Brought into life through my life, she is my reality, my truth, the feeling of the real, and thus the feeling of pleasure as if it is being forced upon me. As if: this possibility, this metaphor, the introduction of writing: her play, the long chain of supplements and substitutions. She enters and leaves through a doorway that folds into other doorways, and other ones, without pause, which is only itself a pause -- the play of an ellipsis...
Writing writes -- the supplement supplements -- the trace traces: such an active field of forces, becoming intimate -- that is, on the one hand, the becoming-inward of an outward interaction and, on the other hand, the becoming-outward of an inward pleasure. In other words, within this active field or relation of forces -- the scene, or rather production, of writing -- is perhaps where intimacy is born(e), is produced or carried across an infinite field of power. Intimacy is then the product of writing, the product of substitutions and mediations, forces acting upon one another, taking over one another, instituting and removing different paradigms: intimacy with the other, she, my truth becoming-fantasy or my fantasy becoming-real, begins with this writing, this paper, my hand...
I will perhaps be criticized for this: that it is writing which allows this intimacy with the other, with her; that my other is necessarily gendered, excluding from sight the whole field of intimate relations which produce, even if secretly, a kind of homo-eroticism; that I will have affirmed an intimacy that is saturated with mediations upon mediations. For how can truth ever be reached that way? Is this not precisely un-realistic, that is, un-pragmatic, having to do with nothing important, significant, in the world? An expression somewhat of madness or delirium or pointless walks down unnecessary roads? Wasted energies?
I must leave these questions unanswered. Not simply because a choice or decision has been made to "abandon all hope," but because responding to them will only push me to defend a thesis that, in my opinion, is indefensible. Unjustifiable, in a sense. That my world must always start anew, under a new name, a new position, a new state, yet by an image that is always signifying the past, like the light from a very distant star -- this cannot be justified under writing here. To those that say I am too romantic or too idealistic or too un-realistic, I cannot respond, and thus lie in my irresponsibility.
On the other hand, it seems the main thrust of this unjustifiability lies in an impossible configuration of the criticisms at hand: how are they to formulate the problem in any other way? This might perhaps point towards the truthfulness of the problem; but in a very simple way, it also points to the problem's extreme narrowness: the inability to formulate it in any other way is an attestation of its weakness, it's powerlessness, it's inability to justify itself outside of itself, a reliance on the power of repetition to reveal somehow the truth of the world (is this not the definition of madness?)...No, I will not go that route, then; my route is troublesome enough.
The force of writing is perhaps the production of intimacy: that feeling of pleasure being almost forced upon you, a suffering of the real, in a sense, since the real is never something that one predicts to bring you suffering. Is not all this the literary life, a life made up of literature, of a narrative that is already being written, of a writing already signifying the death of a star, its supernova?
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