…

Hannah Arendt предполага, че всички човешки активности, ако са погледнати от достатъчно отдалечена точка във вселената, не биха иглеждали повече като деяния, колкото по-скоро биологически процеси.
Тази „генерична неопределеност” е схваната войнствено от Карл Шмит: Човешкият род все още не съществува, тъй като не е намерил своя враг.
Постхуманизъм ли? По-добре fore-humanity, в стила на Ларуел.
Фронталният човек, който може би никога няма да успее да научи срещу какво е бил конфронтиран.

…

On the poetic corpse of Rimbaud we have begun
erecting a tower of Babel. It means nothing that
we still have poets, or that some of them are
still intelligible, still able to communicate with
the mob. What is the trend of poetry and where
is the link between poet and audience? What is
the message? Let us ask that above all. Whose’
voice is it that now makes itself heard, the poet’s
or the scientist’s? Are we thinking of Beauty,
however bitter, or are we thinking of atomic
energy? And what is the chief emotion which our
great discoveries now inspire? Dread! We have
knowledge without wisdom, comfort without
security, belief without faith. The poetry of life
is expressed only in terms of the mathematical,
the physical, the chemical. The poet is a pariah,
an anomaly. He is on the way to extinction. Who
cares now how monstrous he makes himself?
The monster is at large, roaming the world. He
has escaped from the laboratory; he is at the
service of anyone who has the courage to employ
him. The world has indeed become number.
The moral dichotomy, like all dichotomies, has
broken down. This is the period of flux and hazard;
the great drift has set in.

Henry Miller, THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS

 

…

Pirate and whore form mythic couplings and doublings. “The pirates loved women who were sexual and dangerous. We live by the images of those we decide are heroes and gods. As the empire, whatever empire, had decayed, the manner of life irrevocably became exile. The prostitutes drove mad the pirates, caught, like insects in webs, in their own thwarted ambitions and longings for somewhere else … The pirates worshipped the whores in abandoned submission.”

Pirates escape the laws even of gender. “Pirates aren’t always either male or female.” “Pirate sex began on the date when the liquids began to gush forward. As if when equals because. At the same time, my pirate penis shot out of my body. As it thrust out of my body, it moved into my body. I don’t remember where.”
Pirate sexuality is outside of gender, outside the commodity form: “On dreams and actions in pirates: Their rotten souls burn in their bowels. They only go for pleasure. For them alone, you see, naked bodies dance. Unseizable, soft, ethereal, shadowy: the gush of cunts in action.”

Kathy Acker via McKenzie Wark

…

What could result from this industrial liberty on which so
much hope has been set, this famous principle of free competition,
that was held to be so strongly endowed with a character
of democratic organization? It could only produce
general subjugation, the collective enslavement of the masses
deprived of capital, industrial tools and instruments of labour,
as well as of education, to the class that is industrially provided
and well equipped . They say that the battleground is
open, all individuals are called to the combat, and conditions
for all are equal. Very well, but let us not forget one thing,
that on this great battlefield, there are those who are schooled,
hardened to war, armed to the teeth , and who have in their
possession a great train of supplies, material, armaments and
war machines, as well occupying all the positions, whereas
the others, deprived, naked, ignorant and hungry, are obliged,
in order to live from day to day and to provide for their wives
and children, to implore their very adversaries for work of
some kind and a meagre wage .

Victor Considerant

…

Една вечер Блох разказал на Бенямин за един равин, истински кабалист, който казвал, че за да се установи  Царството на Мира не е достатъчно нито да се разруши всичко, нито да настъпи напълно нов свят. Достатъчно е да се измести тази чаша, този храст или този камък съвсем малко и това е всичко. Но това малко изместване е толкова трудно да се постигне и неговата мяра е толкова трудно да бъде намерена, че с оглед на света човеците са неспособни на това нещо и затова е необходимо Месията да пристигне.

Има се предвид интелигентна промяна, но за съжаление тя е или прекалена, или недостатъчна.

Тук намирам прилика на месианистичната притча с един дзенски коан.

Когато питат Учителя какво е Буда, той неизменно повдига показалеца на дясната си ръка. Идва време за изпит и когато Учителя пита какво е Буда, ученикът повдига показалец. Учителя се пресяга и отсича показалеца с ножа си. Ученикът побягва ужасен. Тогава Учителя го извиква по име и когато ученикът се обръща, Учителя повдига показалец.
Каква е схемата зад всичко това?
Стремеж на господарското означаващо да придобие нови стилове. Но всъщност това е безкрайно повторение на един прекъснат жест.

 

…

Structuralism repeated the main gesture of Galilean science: it explained language through something that strictly speaking does not exist, the signifier and the system of differences forming a chain-like structure. The same repetition can be found in Freud, who as well explained thought mechanisms through something that strictly speaking does not exist, the unconscious. This inexistence clearly does not imply that we are dealing with simple illusions. On the contrary, what is at stake are ontologically incomplete realities or realities that are not thoroughly constituted (as Žižek would put it). Hence, Lacan incessantly repeated that the big Other does not exist. Language, this object of the science of language, in the first place does not exist in the Aristotelian sense, as a stable and ready-made organ-tool of communication. Language always comes in combination with autonomy and causality. A Koyréian thesis on language would therefore be: language does not exist, but this inexistence does not prevent it from having real consequences, or in Lacan’s wording, “What has a body and does not exist? Answer – the big Other” (Lacan, 1991: 74). Le langage is what the scientific discourse extracts, constructs, fabricates from the “living language” (lalangue), or rather, language, this epistemic fabrication, is in the best case the isolated and formalised logical and efficient autonomy of the symbolic and in the worst case a fictitious collection of grammatical and semantic rules, which presuppose a “someone” (intentional consciousness) and an idealised communicational model. In other words, for the Aristotelian tradition, which is today most openly perpetuated by the analytic philosophy, language is still an inefficient existence (mental or cerebral organ). By contrast, for consequent structuralists, language is an efficient inexistence (logic materialised in the multiplicity of unconscious formations, sexuality, discursive poiesis etc.).
We can understand why Saussure insisted that linguistics, in order to become a (Galilean) science of language and break with the (Aristotelian) philosophy of language, needed to be grounded on the separation of language from speech and treat language as if no living being would speak it, as a language of pure spirits rather than a language of speaking bodies. Speech is not only the realm of uncountable variations and the proliferation of subjective dialects but also the terrain, on which Aristotelianism imposed the organonic conception of language and removed linguistic autonomy from the picture. Saussure’s insistence on the side of the “ideal language” thus missed the material consequences, which perpetually dynamise the linguistic construction. Saussure nevertheless acknowledged that two main features mark the object of linguistics: it is unstable and it does not exist (it is no positive ontological substance). Linguistic structure is organised inexistence (synchronicity) marked by permanent instability (diachronicity).
Lacanian structuralism began with a wager that the discursive consequences registered by psychoanalysis in the speaking body (the unconscious and sexuality) were no less capable of becoming an object of science in Koyré’s sense (science of the real). This means that the discursive consequences registered by psychoanalysis in the speaking body could be treated by means of the apparatus of formalisation, by the autonomy of language, that they indeed actualise in the first place. Lacan’s unification of the Freudian unconscious with the Saussurean signifier implies that the unconscious could become the object of a Galilean science, and consequently that its ontological status is equivalent to the objects of modern science. Just as the latter treats external reality as reified mathematics and geometry, psychoanalysis thinks all unconscious formations as materialised discourse, and in doing so it brings about another return to Plato. Freud baptised his epistemic invention in an openly anti-Aristotelian manner: he rejected the term psychology (logos of psyché, science of the soul) and instead coined psychoanalysis (analysis of psyché, dissolution of the soul). The Freudian invention is only possible in the soulless universe of modern science and provides yet another case of the experimental verification of Platonism, its clinical verification, given that the Freudian laboratory is the psychoanalytic cabinet, in which experimentation, that is, an experience of “the real insofar as it is impossible to sustain” (Lacan, 1977: 11) takes place.

Samo Tomšič

…

Negri points out that our contemporary
masters (corporations, media conglomerates, spin doctors, finance
capitalists, post-Fordist outsourcers of all kinds) no longer dream of a kind
of exclusionary, binary totalization and don’t achieve their hegemonic effects
primarily through a normatively repressive logocentrism. What we’ve
been calling post-postmodern capitalism is, as Negri and a host of others
have argued, no longer exactly logocentric: it no longer primarily demands
or seeks a kind of mass conformity, sameness, or totalization. Rather, today’s
cutting-edge capitalism celebrates and rewards singularity, difference,
and openness to new markets and products.

 

…

The electric ethics of modernity was for humanity like a vast vein of fossil fuel, and now it has been depleted. Does this mean that we have to imagine an electronic ethics of tomorrow? Do we have to think of a new way of being human, one inspired by our fascination with robots, just because long ago we tried to do the same and use electrical energy as a model for being human? Transhumanist thinking will give rise to an abundant variety of electronic ethics in the years to come. These will offer us the ability to go beyond our organic, sensate, electric life in favour of a life modelled on robots, artificial intelligence, and electronic creatures. That life will promise to minimise suffering, sickness, and death. We will be able to cognitively process information at a superior level, and we will gain improved mental capacities for memory, integration, and recognition, all in exchange for our vital intensities. When an image and an idea forge an alliance, we find the promise of a new ethical condition. This happened long ago with electricity and intensity, and it is happening now with electronics and information.
But all that the electronic promise can deliver is a technological version of wisdom and salvation. The electronic promise swings the pendulum back from the intensity of life, forcing itself on to thought towards the information of thought forcing itself on to life. That promise in no way extricates us from the ethical vice that traps our conscience in its clutches. It instead merely strengthens the vice’s grip. So we find ourselves pulled in two different directions at once. To one side, we have the tension between the intense life and the wisdom and salvation offered up by religions; on the other side, there is the struggle between the electric life and the electronic life that is to come. At least the electronic life allows us to realise how obsolete the ideal of electric intensity that we came up in has become. We realise this even if, in many realms of social existence, we continue to obey the modern demand to live hard, fast, and intensely. Other ideals are no doubt already in the works. Some people will believe that they should use the being of information as a model and make their lives into a summary of data that can be preserved and prolonged. The qualities of this life would not be intensified, but they would be more efficient; these would include augmented memory, increased concentration, controlled moods, and the ability to keep death at bay.
Believing in this new promise would mean that we have not learned the lesson of the exhaustion of electric ethics. It would mean wanting to reduce life to thought after having hoped to reduce thought to life. It would propose a materialist analogue of the hope for wisdom and salvation. Believing in that promise once more would drag us into a simulated version of existence, one unencumbered by organic life. To do so would allow us to yet again reduce the feeling of life to something else, or let us deduce something from it, but it will not help us maintain that feeling.
We are not asking for a magical mantra that would show us how to live. We only want one thing, the assurance that we can think up a way for our feeling of living to resist anything that threatens to reduce it or take away from it. We have outgrown our childish expectations that some thought might reveal the meaning of life to us or teach us the rules of existence. All we ask of an ethics is that it assure us that it is possible to live a full life without destroying the intensity of life itself. What is the point of living forever if we lose the feeling of living in the process? Rather than the promise of an intense life or eternal life (be it spiritual or material), what we really want is just a promise that we will be able to feel alive as long as we live.
Just expressing this demand is enough to make us realise that we need look no longer for a solution to our problem; the way we have articulated our demands already makes the solution clear. We are no longer looking to pry our way out of the vice that holds us prisoner. What matters now is finding a way to hang in there and resist.

The Life Intense
A Modern Obsession
Tristan Garcia