theory verses

A project in "translation," lineating philosophy, and cutting language and ideas into verse paragraphs to explore what differences it can makes in rhythm and form, texture and text. Philosophy is poetic. Poetry is thinking in tunes.

[theoryverses-blog]

Tao: a field of immanence in which desire lacks nothing

it would be an error to interpret courtly love

in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of transcendence.

The renunciation of external pleasure,

or its delay, its infinite regress,

testifies on the contrary to an achieved state

in which desire no longer lacks any­ thing

but fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence.

Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject;

it is the only way for persons to "find themselves"

in the process of desire that exceeds them;

pleasures, even the most artificial, are reterritorializations.

But the question is precisely

whether it is necessary

to find oneself.

Courtly love does not love the self,

any more than it loves the whole universe

in a celestial or religious way.

It is a question of making a body without organs

upon which intensities pass, self and other-

not in the name of a higher level of generality

or a broader extension, but by virtue of

singularities that can no longer be said to be per­sonal,

and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive.

The field of immanence is not internal to the self,

but neither does it come from an external self or a nonself.

Rather, it is like the absolute Outside

that knows no Selves because

interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence

in which they have fused.

"Joy" in courtly love,

the exchange of hearts,

the test or "assay":

everything is allowed,

as long as it is not external to desire

or transcendent to its plane,

or else internal to persons.

The slightest caress may be as strong as an orgasm;

orgasm is a mere fact, a rather deplorable one,

in relation to desire in pursuit of its principle.

Everything is allowed: all that counts

is for pleasure to be the flow of desire itself,

Immanence, instead of a measure that interrupts it or delivers it to the three phantoms,

namely, internal lack, higher transcendence, and apparent exteriority.

If pleasure is not the norm of desire,

it is not by virtue of a lack that is impossible to fill

but, on the contrary, by virtue of its positivity,

in other words, the plane of consistency it draws

in the course of its process.

[theoryverses-blog]

New Literary History after the end of the new

Now, two new things become possible

for the erstwhile critic on his way

to reincarnation

as a real artist

(a new Pinocchio syndrome perhaps).

The first is the invention of new texts:

you enlarge a piece of

Scythian jewelry

to the point

at which

it becomes the equal of

a monumental frieze

in another civilization.

The critic, then, by the invention

of new nomenclature and neologism,

and by the framing in a new paradigm

of aesthetic or cultural history, transforms

an inert text of some sort

into a bearer of new form

and new perception

and thereby transforms it into an object

of especial and hitherto untheorized significance.

That text then becomes a first of some kind,

and itself a paradigm and model of things to come,

as well as a privileged symptom of Zeitgeist.

Meanwhile that creation—in which the new significance of the curatorial role

can be identified, precisely as just such

a framing of objects that are to be

allegorically transvalued—is intimately related

to the other one that interests us here,

namely the invention of wholly new historical stories

about such objects—the creation of new ideas or concepts of literary or artistic history.

This is then why, in my opinion,

we cannot exactly write new literary histories today,

we cannot execute them in the way the older

framers of projects (artistic or not)

then patiently brought these first glimmering ideas to full realization

step-by-step and in concrete detail.

For such new ideas are not to be realized,

they are and remain purely theoretical,

the task

is to spring them onto the screen of consciousness

precisely as new ideas for this

or that new narrative paradigm of history.

What the writers of new literary history

have to do today is to invent new ideas

of literary history, to pursue the goal

of a Novum that is immediately recognizable as

something hitherto unthought about the process,

and whose examples are not pieces and segments

of the execution of that research so much as themselves

ideas that dramatize what such an execution would look like.

In other words, they try to show us what a carrying out

of this new idea of literary or artistic history would look like

if it really could be carried out (which it can’t be).

Now I have little enough time

to say why this is not relativism or fiction.

It must be marked by an imperative to multiplicity—

to invent one new idea for literary history

must be understood as calling for many more.

These then begin to stake out the bounds of the Real,

they approach it asymptotically

in their very variety and in their contradictions,

like the legendary blind men feeling

the equally imaginary elephant’s sensory properties

—tail, trunk, hide, tusks, and so forth—and reporting

back on their contradictory findings.

This is then the triangulation of the Real,

the identification of a heavy

yet invisible body at the heart of space

that moves all the counters and the pointers

on all the dials of the universe

in a barely perceptible yet inescapable way,

a uttering and a fluttering

through which the Real

becomes as

inescapable

as it is

unrepresentable.

[theoryverses-blog]

Stuart Curran about Wordsworth

Nature is both prison-house

and unending repository of imagery, 

seducing us away from our spiritual essence 

and providing a continual means 

of rediscovering it.

This translates into the ongoing discovery of the self 

through the elemental friction of the dialectic, where

contrary rhythms arise almost

by chance into a complex pattern of

ambivalence, or where the balance is direct

yet perhaps conceals unplumbed depths

of psychic commitment, a grandiose

simplicity to its array of forces.

[theoryverses-blog]

Poetic Thought - J.H. Prynne

What thereby vibrates on the page and in 

the mind of the reader, in knowledge and memory 

and moral understanding, thus does not belong to the poet, 

not any more; it does not belong in the domain of the language 

system, not any more; it does not reside in the fabric 

of dispute about values or competing models of state control,

or visions of a future life. Even the conceptions 

of a public domain 

or an interpretative community 

cannot claim to be its necessary housing, any more 

than a conjured posterity and its compact storage 

in face of the unknown.

These are the outer shells, 

of a dialectic energy working through the methods 

of poetic composition which cannot be defined 

or contained by its shells but must break them 

to become altogether new: new poetic thought.

[theoryverses-blog]

Nothing - Three Inquiries into Buddhism

Contemporary European philosophy and critical theory have long had a robust engagement with Christianity, there has been no similar engagement with Buddhism—a surprising lack, given Buddhism’s global reach and obvious affinities with much of Continental philosophy. 

Focused on “nothing”—essential to Buddhism, of course, but also a key concept in critical theory from Hegel and Marx through deconstruction, queer theory, and contemporary speculative philosophy—the book explores different ways of rethinking Buddhism’s nothing. 

Through an elaboration of “sunyata,” or emptiness, in both critical and Buddhist traditions; an examination of the problem of praxis in Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis; and an explication of a “Buddaphobia” that is rooted in modern anxieties about nothingness, Marcus Boon, Eric Cazdyn, and Timothy Morton open up new spaces in which the radical cores of Buddhism and critical theory are renewed and revealed.

Amazon

[theoryverses-blog]

Keats for Beginners

Precisely because one is ignorant of all that one does,

of the significance of what one does

(such is the absence of oneself to oneself

that writing marks and preserves), one has a chance to begin,

even though in beginning one is exposed to an ignorance

that cannot fully be claimed. The politics of beginning

is offered as an attempt to preserve and pass along one's ignorance,

always also a sign of the very freedom to make a beginning,

and so a sign, a way of acknowledging, that others are,

that others precede and will come along after.

In this way beginning too may be

the displaced name for a linguistic predicament,

if also the condition of the possibility of politics—

a reminder that one is just beginning,

the most common and least possible thing to know.

[theoryverses-blog]

Figural Relativism: or the Poetics of Historiography

we must refuse to admit

that history repeats itself

and we must patiently insist

that the cyclical vision

of Metahistory as a whole

is an optical illusion

generated by the

autonomization

of a set of phenomena – 

historiography

and theories of history.

[theoryverses-blog]

Anima Poetae - Coleridge

"What a swarm of thoughts and feelings,

endlessly minute fragments, an, as it were,

representations of all preceding and embryos

of all future thought, lie compact in any one moment!

So, in a single drop of water, the microscope discovers what motions,

what tumult, what wars, what pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of death and life, death-hunting life, and life renewed and invigorated by death!

The whole world seems here in a many-meaning cypher.

What if our existence was but that moment?

What an unintelligible, affrightful riddle, what a chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless, nothing begun and nothing ended, would it not be?

And yet scarcely more than that other moment of fifty or sixty years, were that our all.

Each part throughout infinite diminution adapted to some other, and yet the whole a means to nothing--ends everywhere, and yet an end nowhere."

[theoryverses-blog]

non-Lockean stimulation

"The desire of man being infinite 

the possession is infinite

& himself Infinite."

Blakean economics

thus achieves an eternal equilibrium

expressed in the tract's conclusion as the

reworking of the central Christian mystery

into an image of sympathetic identification.

It is this absolute exchange that guarantees 

the value of Imagination; unsecured by sympathy,

the Poetic character's creative activity

is merely inflationary. 

The Romantic nature

of this system of valuation

is evident in the way in which

inherited hierarchy

is undermined: the distinction of kind

between God and man collapses

into a distinction of degree

as the traditional doctrine of incarnation

becomes proof of Blake's most unorthodox

assertions

of human

divinity.  

[theoryverses-blog]

British Romanticism and the East

It was logically inevitably that a civilization believing itself unique would find itself drowned in the sum total of civilizations, just as personal boundaries would be swamped by over-flowing mobs and dislocations of the rational. All this together was called Romanticism, and it produced, through its many re– creations of the past, the present that propels us forward.

[theoryverses-blog]

The promise of the return of the world can (& has always been) fulfilled by poetry. Even before the process of class struggle is complete. Poetry, centered on the condition of its wordness––words of a language not out there but in here, language the place of our commonness––is a momentary restoration of ourselves to ourselves.

George Bernstein, from "Three of Four Things," Content's Dream: Essays 1975-84

[theoryverses-blog]

Agamben on Philology and History

Just as children, in games

and fairy tales, preserve

the world of myth

freed from its subjection to ritual,

transforming

the divinatory practice

into the game of chance,

the soothsayer’s rod

into the spinning top,

the fertility rite

into the circle game,

so 

philology

transforms mythic names

into words, 

simultaneously 

delivering history

from chronology

and mechanism.

What delineated

the tight linguistic 

chain of destiny

here becomes

the linguistic substance of history. 

Critical mythology

is the legacy left

by philology, in the form

of a vocabulary 

of Indo-European words,

like a new infancy

for Western culture. 

It must now

pass into

the hands

of poetry.

[theoryverses-blog]

magical narratives

we may admit

the descriptive

value of the

post-structuralist

critique of the "subject"

without necessarily endorsing

the schizophrenia ideal

it has

     tended

          to project.

[theoryverses-blog]

Art finds Institutional Recognition of its plight for Economic Necessity.

this is the point at which I must 

remind the reader

of the obvious;

namely, that this

whole global, yet American,

postmodern culture

is the internal and superstructural expression

of a whole new wave

of American military and economic domination

throughout the world:

in this sense,

as throughout history,

the underside of culture

is blood,

torture,

death,

and terror. 

Fredric Jameson, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"

[theoryverses-blog]

Minima Moralia #50

The demand for intellectual honesty

is itself dishonest.

Knowledge comes to us through a network

of prejudices, opinions, innervations,

self-corrections, presuppositions

and exaggerations,

in short

through the dense,

firmly-founded but by no means

uniformly transparent

medium of experience.

[theoryverses-blog]

Horkheimer on Labor

I do not believe that human beings naturally enjoy working, no matter whether their work has a purpose or not. Originally, the position of man is like that of a dog you want to train. He would like to return to an earlier state of being. He works in order not to have to work. The reification of labor is a stage in the process that enables us to return to childhood, but at a higher level.

[theoryverses-blog]

The Concept of Enlightenment

under the

pressure of

labor, through

the centuries,

pleasure

has learned self-hatred,

and therefore

in the state of

totalitarian emancipation

remains

mean and disabled

by self-contempt.