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)

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.

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'?

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."

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.

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'???

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.

Morning Reading

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

And L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze

A(nother) note on rhetoric

If your opponent supports some group of people on account of its being oppressed, persecuted, marginalised etc, assert that he/she actually supports their beliefs and culture. Suppose for example, your opponent expresses his solidarity with some oppressed Catholic peasants in Latin America, he is necessarily a supporter of neo-feudal theocracy, sexual repression, draconian anti-abortion law etc, in league with reactionary anti-Enlightenment forces etc

Say things like:

Are you really comfortable being on the same side as someone who believes that a piece of bread is the flesh of God??

Talks

Zizek's master class on Lacan at Birkbeck college.

Ranciere at the ICA, 27th March.

Letters

In relation to an earlier post on letters and letters writing, it is probable that I was thinking of this:

"It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters we receive from a person should be more or less similiar to oneanother and combine to trace an image of the writer sufficiently different from the preson we know to constitute a second personality"

Proust, ROTP, iii, 66.

Secure in the bay of his illness

The writer: someone who is most at home when (and in) writing. What makes someone a writer rather than, say, a philosopher who writes, is that his thoughts do not precede his writing. His writing reveals his ideas to him.

The experience the writer has is of his writing as a clearing
where he himself becomes visible.

Let's say this writer has been to a conference, a conference populated by speakers, by people who like speaking and know how to project their voice and lend to their words the appertunance of charm. The conference confiscates the writer's energies from him, forces him to submit to an alien rule of sociability. So then, on the train returning home from the conference, looking out of the windows at the old docklands, the tall steel and glass buildings reflecting the winter sun, then he begins to write. Becuase this returning home after conference exhaustion, this is itself a figure of writing.

"One day noticing a small swelling on his stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need no longer concern himself with anything, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the non-distant end'

Perhaps not to this extent, but the writer is sometimes caught wishing for illness, as for a bay into which he can sail and disembark. Here, disburdedned of temporal duties he can set up his work station. Here, with his writing tablet, his fountain pen, he can begin the ritual of summoning his hidden self to the table.

S.B Arkem-Low

National Homeland

'The Firbolgs-----‘bagmen’ in Irish-----were the mythical people who are said to have inhabited the island before the arrival of the Celts. If there were still any of them around today, they could no doubt claim prior and proper possession of the place, in resistance to Celtic colonialism.'

From Terry Eagleton, Nationalism and the Case of Ireland.

Dropped out of the calendar

I always attributed the phrase 'a day that had dropped out of the calendar' to Walter Benjamin, but I've almost certainly misremembered it. He said something to that effect, although it was, I think, in a revolutionary and historical context. But every year there are days which seem to have 'dropped out of the calendar', by which I mean only two things:

1) A day like today, in February, when I can walk down the street without a coat, sit out on the balcony reading, breathing in what feels almost like spring air. So it's like a Spring day, or a promise of that, interpolated into February.



2.) A day which doesn't fit its designated name. So, on or near Christmas for example, people will say 'it feels like a Sunday' or simply 'what day is it?' But in particular, and these are curiously among my favourites, those days that fall between the end of Christmas and the beginning of the New Year - days which seem to have no place, supernumerary days, where time seems to pause, idle days but without guilt, for time itself is stalling not you. These days are, in time, what a railway station is spatially.

2 Interviews

Both lucid and interesting. This, with Lacan (from 1957); and this (via A Gauche) with Badiou.

Here is Badiou on Zizek, which I quote partly because of my (near) agreement with it, partly becuase of what I take to be the twinkle of humour in it:


I think that the brilliant work of Žižek is something like the creation of a conceptual matrix that has the power to shed new light on a great field of cultural facts: movies, books, sexual differences, sexual practices, psychoanalysis, and so on. And so I read Žižek as a strange and completely new composition, the composition of a conceptual nucleus between Lacan and German Idealism. He is an absolutely singular unification of Lacan and Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. With this sort of conceptual nucleus, with this conceptual matrix, Žižek can interpret anything in the world. You can ask him, ‘What do you think about this horrible movie?’ And he will have a brilliant interpretation that is much better than the actual movie because his conceptual matrix is very strong and very convincing.