Empyrean Ruins

Saturnine, hermitic, multifarious.

[voirlvmer]

“And if the angel says: Do you know life? / Then I must say: Life devours”

— — Rainer Maria Rilke, Irschenhausen, September 1914, Poems to Night, tr. Will Stone (via lifeinpoetry)

[topcat77]

Luciano Cian

[fierce]

[sunrec]

““The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.””

— Gilles Deleuze

[pastperfectcontinuous]

Mark Fisher on unemployment and the job search

“Why can everyone else do it and not me? When I was unemployed, I was convinced that an absolute ontological gulf separated me from work. Work — which, like “being in a relationship” — would automatically confer on me the status of being a Real Person. But the horrific irony was that one couldn’t achieve this status. You couldn’t become a Real Person by getting a job. It was the other way round: only Real People could get work. Being unemployed wasn’t a cause of shame; rather the sense of shame which I carried around as if it was the core of my being was what prevented me getting a job. So my job applications and interviews had an air of total hopelessness about them. I know there’s no way you would give the job to an insect like me, and we both know I couldn’t do it even if by some miracle you offered it to me, but… It took me years to realise that job interviews were a ritualised exchange where the point was to determine whether you knew what the right communicative etiquette was, and that telling the truth made you some weirdo. Surely even those who have not been in the Castle know that one doesn’t behave like that… Being a postgraduate student was little better than being unemployed — not least because it was regarded (by me as much as anyone else) as a way of avoiding work. (A friend once remarked that, in most circles in Britain, it would be less shameful to confess to being a drug addict than to admit you were a postgraduate student in an arts subject.) But I only “avoided work” because I didn’t think I could do it (...)

For me, it was absolutely a question of being projected into a space between classes. When I did work in factories, I was either pitied or pilloried. Every job seemed impossible: manual work because of my feckless diliatoriness, graduate jobs because, well, I wasn’t the sort of person who could do them. Me, a teacher, a journalist or a lawyer — surely not. Is there anyone who has caught the agony of this state of worklessness better than Morrissey? The useless jouissance of refusing what was anyway impossible: “No I’ve never had a job/because I’ve never really wanted one”, “No, I’ve never had a job because I’m too shy…” I do sometimes think that the implicit political position in those handful of early Smiths songs was one of the most powerful of the Eighties. Singing “England is mine and it owes me a living” at the time of three million unemployed and the Miners’ Strike… Rejecting the masculine destiny of Fordist worker at the very moment when that destiny was being denied to the working class (“No, we cannot cling to the old dreams any more”)… Rejecting, that is to say, all of those working-class homilies about the dignity of labour… If there was a militant dysphoria in Morrissey it was here… and the dysphoria was absolutely integral to the militancy: incapacity as refusal. Failure as negative capability. I’d rather be me miserable and shy than a successful communicative capitalist (...) [M]any members of my family have never encouraged me to write, and continue to regard it as a “hobby”, doing everything they can to put pressure on me to get “proper work”… Contrast this with the bourgeois kids doing unpaid internships for years on end…”

—Mark Fisher, The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher: “no i’ve never had a job...”

[perkwunos]

The stupidity of over-specialization can really be on display at times with academic philosophy–where very sophisticated and elaborate arguments can be made about highly specific problems and their histories so as to appear insightful or well-informed, while still uncritically presupposing whole edifices of more systematic theories whose implications are the really important problems. In a sense this always has to happen: we’re always going to be presupposing wider domains to investigate some issues–this is required not only by any basic division of labor in society which no intellectual work can escape existing within but also by the basic process of life that requires selection and emphasis–but the whole point of philosophy ought to be to continually push against these sorts of abstractions and bring to light the wider presuppositions–to be able to engage in a reasoning that allows for more useful abstractions–and in fact I think this is exactly what most people are initially attracted to philosophy for and liable to become disappointed about it failing to do. I’m as much against anti-intellectual complaints of technical sophistication and dense writing as anyone, but I’m increasingly concerned that the whole technical mode of presentation of discourses can make their connection to vital issues obscured, as they are part of a mishandled process of education and research that renders even the people who have gained proficiency with the language in the end overall ignorant. Even in recent turns to more “speculative” and comprehensively metaphysical thinking, it still feels just as provincial, where everything is still defined by a narrow set of concerns and a limited basis of material to model: where people occupy their niche positions with whatever buzzword they can market it by (and market in an increasingly literal sense it seems, by the trends in academia). Even when it comes to frameworks I myself enjoy and pursue, like Whiteheadian or Marxian theories, I’m afraid of this happening (even while I find their best trains of thought entirely antagonistic to this entire situation).

[heteroglossia]

“What distance must I maintain between myself and others if we are to construct a community without collision; sociability without alienation; and a form of individual freedom that may imply solitude but not isolation?”

— Katja Haustein, “How to live alone with others: Notes on the Ethics of Tact”

[scorpioz6]

Infinite distances...

[twofigs]

“each “individual” is made up of all possible histories of virtual intra-actions with all Others. indeterminacy is an un/doing of identity that unsettles the very foundations of non/being. together with derrida we might then say: “identity … can only affirm itself as identity to itself by opening itself to the hospitality of a difference from itself or of a difference with itself. condition of the self, such a difference from and with itself would then be its very thing … the stranger at home.” individuals are infinitely indebted to all Others, where indebtedness is not about a debt that follows or results from a trans/action, but rather, a debt that is the condition of possibility of giving/receiving.”

karen barad

[istmos]

Wherever the “we” is a kind of fusional community where responsibility is swamped, I can see danger. Moreover I have, with experience, contracted an allergy to any community of that type. But on the other hand, I would term “we” acceptable when it is made of interruptions, where those who say “we” know that they are singularities with an interrupted connection. Not only does that not prevent us saying “we” and talking to ouselves and hearing ourselves; but the condition for talking to ourselves and hearing ourselves is that this interruption remain. Imagine the closest possible proximity between two beings: love, erotic experience, extreme ecstasy; distance is not abolished, infinite distance remains. The “we” is a species, it’s like when you roll the dice or when you cast your line, when a fisherman casts his line; perhaps there is a “we” on the other side? It’s a promise, it’s a request, it’s a hope. It can also be a fear. When I say “we” I hope that it is not us, that we are not enclosed inside this “we”. To say “we” is a mad gesture in a certain way, mad with hope, with fear, with promise. But it certainly is not a peaceful assurance about what this “we” is. There is no “we”. A “we” has never been discovered in the wild.

““We” are interrupted: Jacques Derrida on the condition for being together”, 1999

[syntheticphilosophy]

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

[scorpioz6]

It is impossible to deceive youself. You can only allow yourself to be decieived.

[scorpioz6]

God is the name of the hope for the other to be the Other.

[podencos]

“Mutual love is often thought of as mutual recognition: I see you for who you are and you see me back. But recognition is inevitably also a naming, a fixing, a pinning down. In order to recognize, you have to categorize, and categories are notoriously inflexible. Recognition, if understood as a projection that disallows the evolution of self and identity, becomes restrictive rather than liberating. However inadvertently, the recognition required for mutual love can easily slip into a form of control.

Jan Verwoert describes the slippage between love-as-recognition and love-as-control in an essay called “Masters and Servants or Lovers: On Love as a Way to Not Recognize the Other.” He writes,

“To love the other, we believe, is the most intimate way to recognize the other, to get to know and understand who he or she really is … But this is what power is about as well, when it manifests itself in structures of domination. Modern regimes of power are built on the intimate knowledge of who the people are they dominate. Surveillance, espionage, and market research are techniques of recognition … Consequently, radical love would be a love that goes beyond recognition, that is a love in which the lovers would renounce their desire to fully grasp the identity of the other and no longer insist on understanding who the other is.”

[…]

So how might one learn to love another without reducing the other to recognizability, without fixing the other to a single unchangeable name?

Or should it go the other way around: must the lover consent to being forever misrecognized? Is allowing oneself to be transfixed a fundamental part of loving and being loved?

[…]

“Eros is an issue of boundaries,” writes Anne Carson. “He exists because certain boundaries do … But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh, and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.” Unrecognition is the acknowledgment of that interval: the gap, the inevitable boundary, the skin, the irreducible difference between. Performing the bite is acting out the desire to annihilate the boundary, while accepting the impossibility of resolution. The bite is one of love’s “tactics of imagination,” tactics that Carson writes are all aimed at resolving the “edge between two images that cannot merge into a single focus because they do not derive from the same level of reality—one is actual, one is possible. To know both, keeping the difference visible, is the subterfuge called eros.”

Consent-based larp revives the hope of unrecognition, but not the kind premised on anonymity or enabled by technology. It is premised instead on the very old technology of emotional labor. Unrecognition IRL is a lot of work. Work towards an impossible goal—you can’t know every new iteration of self, yours or another’s. You can never dissolve the irreducible difference. You can only acknowledge the fact of constant transformation despite the appearance of constancy. Love is not anonymous, but neither is it fixed to a single name. Whereas a system of control desires to recognize you as a generic entity according to a single name, a system of mutual love recognizes you as wonderfully multiple—as endlessly specific.”

Ask Before You Bite, Elvia Wilk

[becuzitisbitter]

“In the criminalization of our pleasures, we’ve found the pleasure to be found in crime!“”

— Criminal Intimacy -“a gang of criminal queers” Published in Total Destroy, 2009

[scorpioz6]

“The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any type of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of his country are the sides of his skull.”

―Flannery O'Connor, Collected Works

[scorpioz6]

Forgive me, dearest... you, of all people, knew very well that my life, like my thinking, is marked by extremes—a juxtaposition of objects and thoughts which seem irreconcilable and which take shape only in the face of danger. But solely in love—in the danger of love—I acknowledge my failure.

[scorpioz6]

To suffer from innocence; to suffer from losing it... the suffering that suffers from itself; the suffering that struggles each moment to make itself guilty, hoping thereby to be relieved....

[scorpioz6]

"Take provocation, for instance, which is the opposite and the caricature of seduction. It says: 'I know that you want to be seduced, and I will seduce you.' Nothing could be worse than betraying this secret rule. Nothing could be less seductive than a provocative smile or inciteful behaviour, since both presuppose that one cannot be seduced naturally and that one needs to be blackmailed into it, or through a declaration of intent: 'Let me seduce you.'"

—Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication