Unrequited meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJy32zQHKUY&list=RDlJy32zQHKUY&start_radio=1

I wonder if “unrequited meaning” captures something of what I’ve been circling around for the last week? A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that cannot straightforwardly be named but which calls for being symbolised. There’s something condensed in these lines which feels like unrequited meaning to me:

Let the tower fall!
Where space is born
man has a beach to ground on

– Charles Olson, La Torre

I don’t know what I think they mean, nor am I entirely clear what exactly they are evoking in me. This isn’t ‘the feel of an idea’ which I can just put into words if I make the effort. This is something prior to that: the feel of a feel (of an idea)? It’s a felt invitation to give form while that form remains utterly opaque. It’s a meaning that wants to be met. A sense of something reaching out, through the rift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js5kgLLULyA

As Lesley Chamberlain writes of Rilke’s sensibility: “if there is some power of goodness which shows up in the making of works of art, it is what compels us to go on reaching for the right words in the right order to give that goodness some flimsy hold on life”. I’m gesturing towards the Otherness of what compels us to go on reaching, the sense there’s something in these felt structures which doesn’t come from within us. I remain agnostic about how to map the phenomenology of this onto real structures (Lacan and post-Deleuzian philosophy give slightly different versions of the same ready-made answer that I’m dimly sensing the machinic character of language) but there’s a pleasure to lingering in the phenomenology of it. I’ve long been captured by Eliot’s notion of ‘raiding the inarticulate’:

But what other modes of relating to the inarticulate are there? There’s an apophatic emptying out of oneself when faced with the vastness of it, for example in certain forms of spiritual practice or being held by the sublime. This doesn’t exhaust the modes of relating to the inarticulate: what I’m circling around here is trying to be receptive to what feels alien in the inarticulate. The sense of something extrinsic which we’re distorting and domesticating when we raid it. The weirdness of the inarticulate. I shared this post with Opus 4.5 and it suggested hospitality towards the inarticulate:

What you’re identifying is a third posture. Eliot’s raid treats the inarticulate as territory to be conquered, resources to be extracted, even if the equipment is shabby and the victory partial. The apophatic empties out the self to become adequate to the vastness—a kind of surrender through subtraction. But you’re describing something more like hospitality. Letting it approach. Making space. The figure in the field isn’t raiding and isn’t emptying—they’re receiving, staying present while something alien arrives on its own terms.

“The weirdness of the inarticulate” is crucial. The raid domesticates; the apophatic sacralizes. Both tame it in different ways. What would it mean to let it stay weird? To articulate without fully translating? That’s what you did with the Olson lines—you surrounded them with context, you let them resonate, but you didn’t explain them. They’re still strange. The meaning is still, in a sense, unrequited—but now it’s unrequited together, in company with other fragments that share its frequency.

Charles Taylor’s philosophy of articulation had a profound impact on my thinking 20 years ago. Am I stumbling into a psychoanalytical project which reverses the valence of his philosophical anthropology: modes of inarticulacy? For Taylor the inarticulate was always a challenge to articulation. There was an ethical dimension to retrieval in which making our moral sources articulate was intrinsically a positive thing. He was concerned with drawing out what was latent within the silence, while recognising the dangers involved in this. From Philosophical Arguments, by Charles Taylor, pg 124-125:

The silence is where there are not yet (the right) words but where we are interpellated by entities to disclose them as things. Of course this does not happen before language; it can only happen in its midst. But within a language and because of its telos, we are pushed to find unprecedented words, which we draw out of silence.

What I’m circling around is the challenge of lingering in the inarticulate. From What IS Sex?, by Alenka Zupančič pg 139 with my emphasis added:

It is about words that name something about our reality for the first time, and hence make this something an object of the world, and of thought. There can be words and descriptions of reality prior to it, and there always are. But then there comes a word that gives us access to reality in a whole different way

What I’m pointing to this the threshold: the thing which is almost named, the words which almost provide access, the object which is almost constituted in our thought. But not quite. I’m pointing towards what Wallace Stevens called the obscure world:

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

What non-human things live in this obscure world? What exists there in its own terms? How does it animate our existence? What do we lose when we articulate it? What redemptive power is there in inarticulacy which I’ve spent the last twenty years chronically unable to see?

Let the tower fall ✊

(In the back of my mind here is clearly two things from middle period Bollas: (1) the distinction between phallic forms of declarative knowing and the associative meshwork through which declarative knowing becomes possible (2) free association as an anti-hermeneutics which unbinds meaning, interrupting interpretations which bind meaning. What the ‘tower’ represents to me is the binding of meaning. Necessary, inevitable but also something which can and should be resisted. Still very much metabolising this though)

#breakcore #CharlesOlson #charlesTaylor #ChristopherBolla #christopherBollas #ethicsOfArticulation #Lacan #LesleyChamberlain #meaning #poetry #Rilke #Zupancic

An epoch approaching extinction while something new is straining to evolve

Towards the end of Stefan Zweig’s 1925 book Nietzsche he reflects on the late warnings of an “atmospheric, whose nerves read in the closeness of the air the oncoming storm”. As Nietzsche wrote: “the ice beneath us is already too thin: we all sense the warm and dangerous breeze heralding the thaw”. For Zweig it seems that “No one felt so keenly that an epoch was approaching extinction and that in the midst of this deadly crisis something new was straining to evolve” (pg 88). He reads Nietzsche as a prophet of impending catastrophe, coupling breathtaking lucidity with incipient madness, as a man “whose nerves were shot but still gave rise to the most courageous thoughts” (pg 85). It’s easy to imagine how potent these warnings would seem to Zweig, writing in the interregnum, surveying the devastation of the first world war in the years before he would be forced to flee Germany.

I was surprised to realise this bleak quote was actually from The Gay Science which I’d always understood as the closest thing Nietzsche produced to a theory of flourishing. Particularly so given I’d just reread it a new translation and had no memory of this evocative warning, which I found so potent when presented as a singular sentence. This is the full passage in David Petault’s translation:

We children of the future, how could we possibly feel at home in this present? We are estranged from all ideals that might allow someone to feel at home even in this fragile, broken transitional period; as for their “realities,” we do not believe they have any permanence. The ice that still supports us today has become very thin: the thawing winds are blowing, and we ourselves, we the homeless, are something that breaks the ice and other too-thin “realities”… We “conserve” nothing; we do not wish to return to any past; we are not “liberal” at all; we do not work for “progress”; we do not need to block our ears against the sirens of the future that the market sings—those who call for “equal rights,” “free society,” “no more masters and no more servants” do not entice us!

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: A New Translation (p. 272). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I was unsettled reading this to realise how readily I often gloss over passages of Nietzsche which are uncomfortable, difficult to understand or fail to resonate with me. This after all is Daniel Tutt’s claim about Nietzsche in How To Read Like A Parasite: left-Nietzscheans (which I would consider myself to be, even though it’s not a particularly salient intellectual identity for me) selectively read him in a manner which is particularly dangerous given his deeply strategic sense of how readers might relate to him. He was fundamentally a reactionary thinker, argues Tutt, committed to producing political technologies which could hold back the tide of socialism.

What makes it particularly uncomfortable, beyond belatedly seeing Tutt’s point in my own reading, comes from how much parts of this passage resonate with me. When I read it closely there’s so much here which echoes my own experience of losing any sense of political hope from December 2019 onwards, through to a political horizon receding entirely as I was overwhelmed by a rearguard action to prop up my life as it fell apart during the pandemic, through to experiencing a fragile regrowth of a belief in recent months that things can be better. Yet how could we possibly feel at home in this present? Indeed I find it astonishing that anyone could feel at home in this present but what’s more salient is, as Nietzsche puts it, the state of being “estranged from all ideals that might allow someone to feel at home even in this fragile, broken transitional period”.

We are in a fragile, broken transitional period again. The possibility Nietzsche is alluding to, indeed Tutt argues is proactively seeking to foreclose, arises that shared ideals might allow someone to feel at home in this present. That there might be ways of living and working with others that seek to address the fragility and act reparatively towards this broken world. That ideals can bring people together, making hope normal again in the face of endemic despair. That the horizon of possibility is made rather than given. That it can be remade. While I still think Tutt overstates large swathes of his critique I do now think he’s correct that Nietzsche’s lonely heroic subject can be understood in terms of foreclosing what we might think of as a collective aspiration in the face of nihilism. I was mystified by Tutt’s claim that Nietzsche can be understood as the first (right) accelerationist but I can now see what he means, particularly in this passage. The intention is to be the breaker of the ice rather than to conserve the past or work towards a better future.

Yet I still find the Gay Science a beautiful strange little book. I imagine Nietzsche less like a fascist philosopher and more like a Rust Cole. A broken yet strangely noble man who forces himself to look closely at matters which he feels, with some justification, those around him studiously avoid. Indeed he elevates this position into a passion, even a religion. We can learn from what he’s drawn to, as well as the questions it provokes in him, without accepting his answers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8x73UW8Hjk

Zupančič argues that Nietzsche can be read as a theorist of the Real. In her biography Lesley Chamberlain describes the “beautiful problem” he was preoccupied by. From Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin pg 121:

The paradox was that the realization of limitation was liberating. The Upper Engadine’s 5,500 feet above sea level stood for the msot desirable capacity in human beings to see far and over the heads of individual nations and people and creeds, the ability to survive by rising above the fray, and the need to go beyond the familiar world in order to see arbitrariness of its values. In Twilight, Nietzsche wrote of this extreme standpoint:

“One would have to be situated outside life, and on the other hand to know it as thoroughly as any, as many, as all who have experienced it, to be permitted to touch on the problem of the value of life at all”

It is a beautiful problem, the moment human beings realize they belong to no other realm but the present and have no God to whom they can pray.

A beautiful problem in a “fragile, broken transitional period” might not seem so beautiful. Particularly if you live an isolated peripatetic existence plagued by ailments which disfigure your capacity for the things in your life which bring you joy. But it remains a beautiful problem which, contra Tutt, I don’t think can be overlooked on the way to collective action. There’s no way round it, only through. The point is not to get stuck where Nietzsche got stuck. Nor to get drawn in by his self-valorising calls to remain there with him. It’s something to pass through, not to end with.

This is why for all his portentousness I find Zweig’s formulation so evocative. In this bleak time we see an epoch approaching extinction while many things are straining to evolve. The duplicity at the heart of Nietzsche is the indifference he preaches in the face of what could be. The point Tutt makes which I now entirely buy is that Nietzsche is a deeply political thinker. There is a political project for him defined by the foreclosure of other political projects, those predicated on what he sees as ressentiment. The books also document that political project as an existential response to Chamberlain’s ‘beautiful problem’. That’s what we need to focus on in left readings of Nietzsche I would argue: the moral psychology of how we respond to nihilism in a broken and fragile world. It’s ok to have ideals but, as he puts it in Ecce Homo, we should “put on gloves before them”. They should be ones we really have arrived at rather than inherited. Chosen rather than assumed.

This is an orientation of care as much as distance, recognising the worth of what we have alongside the possibility for damage. It means that collective projects confront the lack of guarantees, such that people are equipped to leap in spite of them. This was for many people I suspect, certainly myself, what was missing in 2019 and why the defeat of Corbynism was so utterly crushing. It’s the collective corollary of what Daniel Gaztimbide describes here in a more individualised mode:

I often find that it’s going through the pessimism, the darkness, the struggle, that you wind up creating a pocket where there is no other option but joy. The way it comes up with many clients is getting to a place of, ‘well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would you want to do? Not, what do you have to do to survive, or appease the Other, but what would you just want? … It’s wrestling with that precipice of death, where all you’re left with is your own desire. And oftentimes that desire is oriented to something. I want. I want to be with loved ones. I want a tomorrow, regardless of whether that tomorrow will come.

Can this ever ultimately be separated? Even for Nietzsche they couldn’t, with his works filled with the effort to repress a collective dimension which Tutt convincingly argues saturates his work. For the rest of us they certainly can’t be. In his less bleak moments I wonder if Nietzsche doubted this as well:

It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come…

The Gay Science

Writing this prompted me to finally finish Tutt’s book. I realise that he’s advocating something similar in the sense of working through Nietzsche rather than simply dismissing him. But he conceives of this in explicitly political terms which overlooks the point I’m trying to make here. As Jacob Burckhardt put it, quoted by Zweig, Nietzsche’s books “Increased independence in the world… independence in the world, not independence of the world”. In this we can find, in Zweig’s terms, “an atmosphere, a clear atmosphere of higher lucidity permeated by passion, of a demonic nature, which discharges itself only in storms and destruction”. There’s something of this conveyed in Tutt’s description of sweating out the parasite but I think the contribution it makes to our wellbeing is lost in that metaphor. Can we linger for a bit in this atmosphere? Can we persist through the storms and destruction? If so can we come to our ideals afterwards in a freer, more knowing and more independent way? I suspect we can and therein for me lies the continued existential appeal of Nietzsche in spite of the terrible politics which, persuaded by Tutt, I now concede cannot simply be passed over in any adequate reading of him.

#Nietzscheans #accelerationism #Activism #DanielGaztimbide #DanielTutt #DavidPetault #EcceHomo #hope #LesleyChamberlain #Nietzsche #RustCole #StefanZweig #TheGayScience #Zupančič

Zupančič: How to live a life worth living

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsVpXfBw_W0

#ethics #goodLife #Zupančič

New couples employ basically the same tactics that cults do

From Wellness by Nathan Hill loc 1689:

He says new couples employ basically the same tactics that cults do—they reinforce a collective identity via shared rituals, insider vocabulary, a sense of superiority over the whole outside world—but lack a true cult’s impulse to recruit and brainwash followers.

I know it’s intended as satire. And yet… From Alexandra Stein’s Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems loc 1126:

That is, it may involve many cycles of the basic dynamic that includes a progressively more isolating environment, establishing the group as the main (and eventually only) reference point for the individual, and generating levels of fear or stress arousal that cause the person to keep turning toward the group for support.

See also the Lacanian distinction between love and romance: “The soul mate is the commodity in the form of the subject’s complement… the promise of the soul mate is the promise of completion, an object that would complement the lacking subject perfectly and thereby ameliorate its lack” (pg 192). Therein lies the cultic dimension to new couples described above (which I suspect Hill is seriously proposing, given it’s presented in one of the awkward social scientific interludes of clunky exposition which intersperse his otherwise elegant pose). Building a shared identity on the fantasy of filling the void from which the desire to build a shared identity emerged from in the first place.

It’s self-negating at the level of the real which is why it’s so inflationary at the level of the imaginary, until eventually the internal contradictions come to exercise an inevitably destructive weight. The imagined thing crushes the practice which sustains it, or at least creates a perpetual challenge of negotiating its immense weight. Or the imaginary diffuses into the mundane challenge of the practice, collapsing the tension between banal object and desired object, upon which Zupančič argues love depends: to love means to find oneself with a ridiculous object. From The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two by Alenka Zupančič pg 174-175:

To love – that is to say (according to the good old traditional definition), to love someone “for what he is” (i.e. to move directly to the Thing) – always means to find oneself with a “ridiculous object,” an object that sweats, snores, farts, and has strange habits. But it also means to coninue to see in this object the “something more” ….. To love means to perceive this gap or discrepancy, and not so much to be able to laugh at it as to have an irresistible urge to laugh at it. The miracle of love is a funny miracle.

Real love – if I may risk this expression – is not the love that is called sublime, the love in which we let ourselves be completely dazzled or “blinded” by the object so that we no longer see (or can’t bear to see) its ridiculous, banal aspect. This kind of “sublime love” necessitates and generates a radical inaccessibility of the other (which usually takes the form of eternal preliminaries, or the form of an intermittent relationship that enables us to reintroduce the distance that suits the inaccessible, and thereby to “reusblimate” the object after each “use”). But neither is real love the sum of desire and friendship, where friendship is supposed to provide a “bridge” between two awakenings of desire, and to embrace the ridiculous side of the object.

The point is not that, in order for love to “work,” one has to accept the other with all her baggage, to “stand” her banal aspect, to forgive her weakness – in short to tolerate the other when one does not desire her. The true miracle of love – and this is what links love to comedy – consists in preserving the transcendence in the very accessibility of the other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNbky7yy38c

From Bruce Fink’s Lacan on Love loc 1,334 to 1,349

The lover, on the other hand, gives what he does not have: in a matter of speaking, he gives his lack of something, something he would be hard-pressed to account for or explain, for he does not know what he is missing (Lacan, 2015, pp. 39–40). He feels a lack or emptiness within himself, and a yearning for something to fill the hollow, to make up for his sense that he is missing something – this is the lack or gap from which desire springs [….] Now this lack is precious to us. What we gave up defines us, we feel. It goes to the heart of our perceived individuality, to the core of our “subjective difference” – that is, to the core of what makes us different from everyone else. Thus, it is not with just anyone we meet that we are willing to say that he or she has something that corresponds to the lack in us! We may be protective, not wishing to show we feel lacking in any way, that we need anybody, that we are castrated. We may prefer to shroud ourselves in an aura of sublime indifference, and in certain cases that may get us loved by others, but it has nothing to do with we ourselves loving someone else. To love someone else is to convey in words to that person that we lack – preferably big time – and that he or she is intimately related to that lack.

#AlexandraStein #BruceFink #cults #Lacan #love #NathanHill #relationships #romance #Zupančič

What Nietzsche called the ascetic ideal opposed bodily pleasures to the deeper meaning which could be found in existence. As Reginster puts it, “what is most valuable in life transcends, and therefore excludes in whole or in part the well-being that consists in the satisfaction of natural human “instincts,” such as those which underlie the sensual desires for sex, food, or shelter, and certain psychological desires like the desire for social prestige”. This ascetic ideal does not renounce pleasure but rather gropes towards the possibility of a deeper enjoyment, a mode of being opened up by foregoing proximate temptations. What Nietzsche described as the ‘orgies of feelings’ opened up by the ascetic ideal swamp what is lost in the powerful energies which are created. It opens up a frontier of infinite passions beyond the “fleeting pleasures” and “passing voluptuousness”. The denigration of immediate satisfactions orientates us towards an horizon of infinte possibilities.

As Zupančič notes in The Shortest Shadow, what Nietzsche called ‘active nihilism’ constituted “a fight against semblance, as an attitude of exposing and unmasking the ‘illusions’, ‘lies’ and imaginary formations in the name of the Real”. This “involves the power always to go forward, to remove one veil after another – it is the enthusiasm of knowledge that (still) believes in its salutary power” (pg 63). In contrast” passive or reactive nihilism could be defined precisely as the name of the configuration where men will not to will rather than will nothingness“, an identification of willing with delusion leading to a desire to transcend it (pg 64). This leaves us with a deadlock between willing nothing and not willing, between investing ourselves in what is fleeting or refraining from investment at all. The need to “be in touch with the ‘Real’ to ‘feel like’ as vividly as possible, to feel awake” leaves us trapped in a movement for the answer can be a retreat from the excitement which moves us in the first place. The drive towards ever deeper, more expansive enjoyment, comes to feel like a compulsion which leaves us needing to mitigate our experience of it.

We stand in a contradictory relationship to our own enjoyment: needing it but also retreating from it. We feel we cannot do anything other than invest ourselves fully in our pursuits while simultaneously feeling the need to withdraw from the intensity of our experience. To solely embrace the former leaves us overwhelmed, to solely embrace the latter leaves us mired in a cold world devoid of resonance. Thus we are perched precariously between active and passive nihilism, between surrendering to our enjoyment and retreating from it. Zupančič gives a pleasingly concrete example on pg 69: “To ‘work out’ regularly, to go on a diet, to stop smoking – such things are not perceived as restrictions on our enjoyment, but, on the contrary as its forms or conditions”. The manner in which i organise my enjoyment, in constraining and blunting it, constitutes the condition which makes it sustainable. The question is can I organise my enjoyment while enjoying my enjoyment?

The answer suggests Zupančič comes in how we inhabit this paradox, in which refraining from our embrace of something is the condition for our embracing it. The transcendent objects of our enjoyment, the fantasies of what I might be and do, rest on the capacity of sublimation to “create a stage on which these very ‘obscure passions/drives’ becomes something valuable … the creation and maintenance of a certain space for objects that have no place int he given, extant reality, objects that are considered ‘impossible'” (pg 77-78). Active nihilism dives into this space, smashing through one object after another in pursuit of the real, whereas passive nihilism recoils from what is (rightly) seen as the chaos incipient within this space. What’s dangerous, argued Lacan, is a passion for the Real which seeks to destroy these objects in the hope we will eventually encounter a bedrock of reality which can fully ground our enjoyment. To traverse the fantasy involves grappling with the impossibility of that hope, without a corresponding tumble into passive nihilism:

This process involves the recognition of the Other’s deficiency, the realization that the unconscious fantasies that have been directing one’s desire and contributing to one’s suffering are both relative and doomed to remain unfulfilled and, hence, that there is no transcendent meaning to be found for one’s existence, no ultimate object that will satisfy one’s desire, and no single, fundamental jouissance that will of itself make life worth living.

Lacan, Discourse and Social Change pg 72 [my emphasis]

The problem, argues Zupančič, is that confusing the Real with reality “does not allow much space for our desire to develop”. if we “give up on our desire” such that “we will no longer be prey to all the difficult (and ‘ideological’) choices with which our desire confronts us” we will not find peace, but rather be subject to an imperative to enjoy which is more insistent than ever: “since there is nothing beyond the reality (principle), we have to enjoy each and every moment of it” (pg 82). The ‘beyond’ to which active nihilism orientates itself creates a space for our desire, a sense of the present objects not exhausting the realms of how we can respond to the world. Whereas if these present objects of desire are all that we have, all that we could have, the enjoyment which is the only meaning of life in the absence of a ‘beyond’ commands us to incessantly make the most of them. In not running from our passion we create the possibility of moving beyond the objects of our passion:

This could have the effect of waking the subject, waking him from his dream (but also awakening him to the Real of his own desire and enjoyment). Instead of spending all his energy in trying to scape this thing that persecutes him so passionately, he might just manage to feel some passion for the Thing.

Pg 82

Sublimation takes place at the intersection of the object of drive: “there is the object that is supposed to satisfy the drive (and at which the drive aims), but there is also this very satisfaction that should itself be conceived in terms of an object (satisfaction as object) (pg 83). To use Zupančič’s example, there is the food we eat and the satisfaction we find through eating. To enjoy our enjoyment means treading lightly in this gap, in terms of our objects of desire as well as the field of desire more broadly. Zupančič cautions that “if I say to myself: ‘I know very well that the real object of my drive is not this man, or this steak, or this dress that I desire at this moment, but only the satisfaction that I will find in them … then I risk missing the Real precisely on account of being too efficient”. The enjoyment of our enjoyment arises in this experiences, from the fleeting satisfactions which the object makes possible as well as the broader horizon which makes this satisfaction fleeting but ensures there’s an endless array of other (similarly fleeting) satisfactions to come in future. If we try and ‘see through’ desire we kill desire, but if we treat it naively we get stuck on certain objects and impede the movement which makes it enjoyable. The real is something we ease into, something we fall into, rather than something we struggle for. To enjoy our enjoyment involves loosening our grip on enjoyment, without letting go entirely. To desire our enjoyment involves stepping back from it, but always reflexively and never too far.

This is Claude 3’s response to construct a case profile to illustrate the point I’m trying to make here:

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/06/29/learning-to-enjoy-your-enjoyment/

#asceticIdeal #desire #enjoyment #Jouissance #libido #meaning #Nietzsche #satisfaction #Zupančic