Friday, March 31, 2006

Boo-Hurrah for the Enlightenment

One should always try and rescue words from the work they are made to do in the current rhetorical marketplace, to set aright what stupidity and polemic have turned upside down or reduced to convenient and misleading abbreviation. . One presently rather overworked term is ‘Enlightenment’.

The Virtual Stoa has some questions about the term. He writes:
I think it's worth having answers to questions like these -- otherwise you just end up in a position where you can cheerlead for "the Enlightenment" (the rule of law! democracy! science!) or just slag it off for the bad things you vaguely associate with it somewhere along the way (racism! sexism! Revolutionary Terror!) without letting anything as complicated as history or evidence get in the way of your arguments. And that'd be a shame.
The conditional tense is presumably ironic. But if Chris or anyone thinks that the polemicists who have reduced 'Enlightenment' to a cheap catchphrase just need a few hours in the library, or that the said phrasemongers would welcome enlightenment as to the meaning of Enlightenment, that they actually care about this as a historical or philosophical question, then we are dealing with something akin to a category error.

It will then become evident

The tribunal of reason comes not to terrorise the unenlightened with an external doctrine or fixed measure, but to squint at it sideways until its kernel of truth can be discerned. It does not present the world with an altogether new principle, but allows it to discover the meaning of its existing principles. It compels a mystified humanity to go beyond itself, not by starting again from degree zero, but by a more rigorous form of fidelity. See the following Enlightenment document:
Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be – as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion – to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.

Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Balzac on Coffee

Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. ....... coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects. ...Coffee changes over time. Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended. For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water. For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power. When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days. Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. ...this coffee falls into your stomach ... it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder. ...When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more,... you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counseled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored, one must begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other white meats: finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns to the relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of the retired bourgeoisie. The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing... One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state ... some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. ... We found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.

I'm curious.. has anyone tried Balzac's 'brutal method'?

Friday, March 17, 2006

note on method 3

"I believe it is axiomatic that a philosophy which does not include within itself a theory of its own particular situation, which does not make a place for some essential self-consciousness along with consciousness of the object with which it is concerned, which does not provide for some basic explanation of its own knowledge at the same time that it goes on knowing what it is supposed to know, is bound to end up drawing its own eye eithout realising it."

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Again with the Zizek

In the email this morning: the Winter edition of the Journal of Religious and Cultural Theory contains an mp3 interview with Zizek. Meanwhile, Jodi ponders the extent to which Z. has become the mere vendor of his own reified thoughts.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Tell me about your Motherland

The Enlightenment and its Romantic aftermath gave birth to two doctrines distinguished only by the letter s.* The first was that people had the right to self-determination; the second was that peoples had such a right. The former belief is the keystone of modern democracy, and indeed of socialism; the second is a piece of romantic mystification, a fact which has not prevented a good many on the political Left from endorsing it. Nor has its philosophical basis been much examined in the standard literature on nationalism.

from: Terry Eagleton, "Nationalism and the Case of Ireland".

Can you psychoanalyse A People and not be complicit with this 'romantic mystification'???

Saturday, March 04, 2006

petit aspect a

It can be rhetorically useful to assert that an event/policy is identical with a particular 'positive' consequence/ aspect thereof, regardless of whether this was the primary purpose of the policy. Objecting to the event is nothing more or less than objecting to this single aspect. The carpet bombing of the village has stopped the operations of the terrorist cell, therefore 1) this action is henceforth deemed 'the removal of the terrorist cell' & 2) those objecting to this policy are simply 'those who wished to see the terrorist operations continue'. As with other rhetorical strategies, sheer repetition can more than make up for sheer vacuity.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Morning Reading


Jonathan L. Beller on Deleuze & Cinema etc, via comments at Le Colonel Chabert.

And L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze