Filed under: Scattering Shots
Death consists in an aspect of continuity, that is permeating its priority to its posteriority. It is an object which is gazed, in order to be surpassed through its subjective deferment. It is precisely along this continuity that emancipation is created. Nor does the emancipated subject of death turn into the subject of our everlasting desire once we gaze at death, on the contrary, these two movements coincide with each other. This is the point of a necessary transformation without which the joy of imaginary approaching the death will be disappeared. Through this living the dead, we are split into two parts, one which remains and another which departs. The emancipated self, therefore, is a double identity, it should be alive to create the space of being gazed, where enables it to surmount its dead body. The subject of death is necessarily a third person; this is, perhaps, the fact underlying all conception of death.
Filed under: Introspective
What is it to be always departed? The paradoxical sense of moving toward disappearance while I am already there to embrace it as the inevitably tragic end: the constant iteration of being dead, the conscious process of absorbing the chimerical residue produced through this inescapable spiral. (I am living the state of being in love, and at the same time, I live the situation in which I will not be so.) But, what if I am not standing before an ever receding horizon of definiteness? What if this is a point beyond the logic of the end, one which has withdrawn any starting point? I should live this moment of exteriority, I should stay.
Filed under: Wittgenstein
The oddity of PI§1 starts from the beginning of the example: “I give him a slip marked ‘five red apples’”. Why do not I simply order him, “go and buy five red apples”? By noting Wittgenstein’s remark “If you describe the learning of language in this way…” is not it an artificial example about learning language? The shopkeeper’s behavior far from seeming mechanical or robotic appears as a part of language learning; he looks like one who is learning an assumptive language. He knows that “red” is the name of a color but does not know which color it is; he knows cardinal numbers by heart – why does Wittgenstein emphasize this? – Moreover he understands the order “five red apples” at the first place, say, he knows that he should follow it and give the shopper five red apples; he grasps the order as a whole, he starts from “apples” and not, for instance, from “five”. The interlocutor’s question does not concern with “why” (“why does he look up…”) but with “how”, “how does he know the way of following the order?” The interlocutor, therefore, presupposes the understanding of the order by the shopkeeper. For her, the actions (opening the drawer, finding the color sample, saying the series of numbers) are not problematic, say, it is presupposed that the shopkeeper should act in response to the order. The question deals with how he knows how he should act, and not how he knows he should act; in other words, it is about how he understands, not whether he understands. Are not we thrown in a learning process which is to show the limitation of the account of how little Augustine learned language? The limitation of “that philosophical concept of language [which] has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions.” In this way, the whole example is prepared to show how it is to learn such a language game through the idea of word-object correlation.
By considering the example as a language-learning-game (PI§7) within which both the shopper and the shopkeeper participate, the interlocutor’s question means that “how has he learned to do so?” or, “what is the explanation that that learning requires?” (according to ‘that philosophical concept’) He does not ask any question about “apples”, only “red” and “five” for which there are no ostensive objects, or no explanations; although for “red” Wittgenstein creates such an object in that color chart. Suppose that the shopkeeper asks, “What color does the word ‘red’ refer?” and a teacher responds, “Look at the chart!” About the question, “what is the meaning of the word ‘five’?” (and not “what is the meaning of the word ‘red’?”) or, “how has he learned the meaning of the word ‘five’?”, it is clear that, here, Wittgenstein gradually delimits the possibility of ostensive definition (apples – red – five). In PI§9 Wittgenstein returns to the case of learning numerals. The interlocutor’s question is itself against the Augustinian concept, in the sense that she realizes the limitation of that concept in relation to the words “red” and “five”, but as a sort of lack of explanation: “how does he know…when there is no…?” In other words, according to the Augustinian account of learning a language the word-object correlation is required, a relation which tends to disappearance in Wittgenstein’s example. It is important that in PI§5 Wittgenstein returns to the shopping example, describing it as a ‘primitive form of language’: “A child uses such primitive forms of language when it learns to talk. Here the teaching of language is not explanation, but training.” (Where do explanations come to an end?) PI§6 and PI§9 are completely about learning such “language-games” and the relation between them and ostensive teaching. So, Wittgenstein responds to asking for explanation of learning this “primitive language” by posing the idea of “training”, it is here that there is no need of explanation. It is here, though not in all cases, that “[establishing] an association between the word and the thing” (PI§6) is not “in question”.
Filed under: Scattering Shots
Radical thought always resides on the frontier of history, a frontier which is not there to be transgressed or, on the contrary, to differ the transgression. The frontier should always be here, if the existing state makes sense. But we can also say that it is the outside, beyond the frontier, that is inflated with sense, so that the existing state tends to emptiness, that it is always filled with some necessary fullness. In that case, the frontier should be everywhere, and at the same time, nowhere: a state in which the goals to be achieved and the goals achieved are simultaneously present.
Filed under: Scattering Shots
What is poetry? Any attempt to define the term seems to clash an insurmountable block. Does it stem from the suspiciousness of any definition, as a sort of impossibility in circumscribing any conceptual entity, which implies the necessity of withdrawing the definition as such? It could be a point but not the vantage point of this writing. Here, on the contrary, the aim is to reach the definition, one which affects the question itself. In that sense, the definition, the point which is to be reached, would signify the dislocation of frontiers.
Poetry in the first place, far from concerning any literary classification, could be conceived as the core of aesthetic expression, the essence of artistic experience. The direct consequence of this reading is that we are unable to deal with poetry as a genre: neither poetry nor poetics, but the poetic, the singularity of an event permeating the whole terrain of art-life. Without regard to where it takes place, the poetic condenses the whole to explode it everywhere. So the place of explosion, unlike the typologically assorted genres of art, is always a place of transgression: it is only the poetic which exceeds the institutional dividing lines of art, transforming an everyday experience into a singular one, incorporating discrete moments of life through a poetic being. Thus, there is a compulsion to recur the inquiry: what is the poetic? Or, rather, where is it to be found?
As the poetic is not something there to be discovered, to be revealed, but a creative intervention through which the stream of normality is interrupted, there is no act of questing in relation to it. In that case, another question is raised: what is it to intervene poetically? Is it an imposition of poetry, which means that the poetic must be there beforehand? Obviously it is not the case, for the poetic neither is the posterior nor is it the prior, but the becoming as such. This becoming, however, will be spectral, in the sense that its presence oscillates between being and not being, or as Derrida puts it: ‘a paradoxical incorporation’: “it becomes, rather, some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body”.[1] The becoming brings us directly to the history. If the poetic is an event within the becoming life, there should be some symmetrical relation between it and the history, which could be paradoxically seen as the process of events: ‘the presence of the poetic under the historical…there is always a coincidence of poetic acts and historical events or political actions, the glorious incarnation of something sublime or untimely.’[2]
