To argue is already to lose

Added to notes on rhetoric:

To argue is to lose The very fact that your opponents argue against you is the best evidence against them. It means that your post has 'upset quite a few people', 'got a few people quite agitated,' 'got under their skin' etc They have not made an argument but had a tantrum, they are not making reasoned points but ‘throwing their toys out of the pram’. As in Freudian theory, so in blog rhetoric, to argue or contest only confirms your guilt. (see also: 'always psychologize', 'Emotion', 'Raw Nerve' and 'Goaded'.).

V. much enjoyed seeing this the other night:



Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh-igh,
Shadows--(coughing, then almost inaudible)--of the evening
Steal across the sky.

The Watchword of Friendship

Hölderlin to Hegel

Waltershausen

July 10, 1794

I am certain that you have occasionally thought of me since we parted from one another with the watchword -- Reich Gottes! [Kingdom of God] I believe that we would recognize each other throughout every metamorphosis with this watchword. I am certain that whatever you become, time will not efface this trait in you. I think that this will also be the case with me. Every trait that we love one another for is exquisite. And thus can we be sure of everlasting friendship.

(here)

More coffee

Michelet:

“Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”

Bach's coffee cantata:

"Dear father, do not be so strict! If I can't have my little demi-tasse of coffee three times a day, I'm just like a dried up piece of roast goat! Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have my coffee, and if anyone wishes to please me, let him present me with—coffee!"

"Hot coffee helped him breathe more easily and he was inclined to drink a great
deal of it." (Marcel Proust: A Biography by Richard H. Barker)

"...he had to prepare himself by drinking coffee-- seventeen cups of it, he said..." (Marcel Proust: A Biography by Richard H. Barker)

"Why had coffee survived as his only food? I never asked him. I didn't like to ask
questions." (Monsieur Proust: A Memoir by Celeste Albaret)

Friendship..

nb, Previous posts on friendship partly prompted by couple of things from the Derrida book (see also here):

.. although the figure of the friend, so regularly coming back on stage [?] with the features of the brother - who is critically at stake in this analysis - seems spontaneously to belong to a familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics.

Why would the friend be like a brother? Let us dream of a friendship which goes beyond this proximity of the congeneric double..

&

..is the friend the same or the other? Cicero prefers the same ... the friend is, as the translation has it, 'our own ideal image'. We envisage the friend as such. And this is how he envisages us: with a friendly look. Cicero uses the word examplar, which means portrait but also, as the exemplum, the duplicate, the reproduction, the copy as well as the original, the type, the model.. Now, according to Cicero, his exemplar is projected or recognised in the true friend, it is his ideal double, his other self, the same as self but improved. Since we watch him looking at us, thus watching ourselves, because we see him keeping our image in his eyes - in truth in ours - survival is then hoped for, illuminated in advance, if not assured for
this Narcissus who dreams of immortality.

Friendship, 2

A reader comments on the Friendship post:

"We really will not form friendship bonds with people who do not share the same thought process though".

I wanted to qualify this, or turn it around: in a friendship you have 'thought processes' that you couldn't have had outside the friendship, no? (Granted, I may be talking about certain kinds of friendship here). A conversation inside a friendship will lead to a place neither friend would have arrived at individually. This is partly what I meant by 'composition' - the thought of a friendship, irreducible to the 'thought processes' of either friend.

Perhaps sometimes, the thinking of a friend, in its very obstinate refusal to mirror or correspond with our own thinking, acts as a creative irritant - the necessary creative irritant which, precisely, one could not fashion oneself. And so, the friendship turns on something beyond this difference in thinking. (The idea, here, of a kind of still point on which the friendship turns?)

Finally, is there not something in excess about friendship: it exceeds the plane of identity/ difference. There is nothing on that plane which explains the friendship - or rather, there always is, so that its explanatory value is limited. That is, there are always points of identity and difference, in varying degrees in varying friendships. (If there is close resemblance, it is a mirroring; if none, 'opposites attract' - and all that's in between). Rather, the relation exceeds its parts; the parts escape into the relation.

Virtual Cottard

Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features....

The 'Cottard' is also a rhetorical stategy much used in the blogosphere. Comments should appear suitably encrypted, arch, playful, never quite divulging their meaning. Your interlocuter tries to pin you down, to answer you, but the indefinite ironical form in which your ideas are couched facilitates your escape - you're already elsewhere, or on another level, smiling knowingly. "That is not what I meant at all". Perhaps less Cottard and more the Cheshire cat, a smile without a body of ideas, concerned only to maintain your position of enunciation outside or above the conversation.

On Friendship

Bump into F. who is organizing a conference on friendship. Comments on how issue of friendship often framed by question of similarity & difference. Is the friend like or unlike; is the friendship based on the perception of resemblance or of difference.

2 things:

1. If we do think of friendship in terms of likeness, then isn't it often the case that I am friends with x not so much because she is like or unlike me, but because when with her I am unlike myself. I am translated out of myself, in this way, only with this person.

2. There is a presupposition that the basic units are two individuals, and that friendship is a relation between these two pre-existing individuals. But isn't a friendship rather a composition. Our commitment to the friendship is a commitment to the unity of this composition. The subject of the friendship, its 'we', is a third supernumerary 'we'.

Or, friendship as a line between two points, but the points are just the places the line ends; it does not 'join' the two ends.

Example. My frienship with G. This friendship has a code. It is not the code of friendship but only of this friendship. It is neither mine nor his, but composed only in and by the friendship - the creature of the friendship. This code is formed by the peculiar configuation of G. and I. (The code is the subject-language of the friendship).

This is why we often form friendships with people apparently 'unlike' us (or why the question of likeness/ unlikeness is not primary): because of the peculiarity of the composition. The elements of the composition are 'unlike' judged simply on the axis of resemblance, but as elements of a composition there is no problem.

Friendship:

M Foucault: Let us speak about friends, then, but I will not speakto you of friends as such. I belong perhaps to a rather old-fashioned generation for whom friendship is something at oncecapital and superstitious. And I confess that I always have some difficulty in completely superimposing or integrating relationships of friendship with organizations, political groups, schools of thought,or academic circles. Friendship for me is a kind of a secret Freemasonry, but with some visible points. You spoke of Deleuze who is clearly someone of great importance for me. I consider him to bethe greatest current French philosopher.

[will update this]

willing servants

'In 1855, the year of the first Paris Exposition, Victor Hugo .. announced: “Progress is the footstep of God himself.” '

In the crystal palace of modernity, the signs of Progress were put on display.. Here is exhibit a, the railway; here is exhibit b, the workhouse, exhibit c, the new labour laws..

Return now to the typical address of political leaders in the times we're living. Whenever they face contestation, they have to hide what is happening by swiftly erecting a wall of opaque words. The conclusion of Jacques Chirac's address was a perfect example: instead of challenging the false concept of modernisation, its brutal dismantling is referred to as if it were some chapter in natural science. "The world of work", as the president announced, "in perpetual evolution....."

The economy (rather than this economic system) has its own mechanisms and laws. To be intelligent is to recognise - the objectivity of the economy’s workings and, therefore, your comparative impotence; to recognise that our fate is to be the managers, clerks, administrators; to salute, or assist with guile, what is in any case inevitable - . Progress, Modernisation, the New…..

The particular world organised by capitalism is the Universal; it is synonymous with the natural development of humanity as such. The ideas which function in this particular situation for this particular class or group are universal ideas. 'Modernization' on behalf of humanity etc

An Enlightenment concept: Ideology. Withholding the human world from humanity by dressing it up as nature, as the unfolding of reason, as a process without a subject. An Enlightenment task: to reveal instances where what is taken for nature, or passed off as nature, is in fact merely custom or human contrivance, or even merely the alibi of the powerful; to show that what is proclaimed as a universal - Progress, Modernisation, is only the attempt to place a particular organisation of the world beyond scrutiny and discussion. Demonstrating that something is custom or convention, or mere deception, rather than a fact of nature, is to deliver it into the hands of humanity.

“But, once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants”

role call

'The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.'

(here)