The Philials of Reason have been following me. I just rated this "Web Log" online and came up with a scant rating as "high school" in its sophomoric efforts to achieve itself in some sort of past. Well, so be it, it can only reflect on Oppermann to some extent that his friend who endeavors to render his life in some version of a text should be reduced to a high school vocabulary. Today I have little strength to write. I feel fantastically exhausted. I should not be writing, and there probably should be a law against me coming round.
Of this post Card Oppermann has the following things to say:
"12/25/07 8:50 p. It wouldn't be a real Christmas without a post card of a cute animal! Also it ocurrs to me that your 39th birthday is just around the corner - and that you might profit from a musk rat image more than I could. -The other night I lay awake for a few hours when it seemed like the world had disappeared. I felt no anxiety - realized that I felt no anxiety - then the world returned and I was back in Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology. The best remedy against anxiety is a combination of prayer and exhaustion, so that one can safely go to sleep (or back to sleep) and transfer the anxiety to dreams about airports or exams in the old Gymnasium (a result of an ontological determination)."
When I first read this card I understood the pun and the pleroma of metaphors stemming from Oppermann's last line "(a result of an ontological determination.)" But I have since forgotten all the insights that I had into this. Maybe it was into the void that seemed to be in the absence of the world. Maybe the ontological question is really "sein zum Tode" which would then include one's death and judgment in the eschaton, the means of judging one's life ("gibt es auf Erde ein Mass?" -and all that!), and that life would only be measured precisely by its self: the measure of a life is exactly one life, and so on, and so on... well I understood all that, I understood that Jean Luc Nancy had effectively damned us to the realm of the apparently purely ontic, reduced us to the level of the everyday everywhere, and taken away our capacity to raise anything up as a "sacrifice" to any "exterior"--- all of which does not make sense--- as in the example of greeting the man who said to me at the end of the year (December 31st 2007) one man said to me:
"What if we live in a world where no one believes in God anymore!"
My response was:
"Well then God bless you!"
I might add that from Jean-Luc Nancy's cool and calm position he may appear to be the dean of intellectuals, in complete control of himself. But what if he speaks really with the despair of the Seljack who looks out at the child-demons who are pestering him and his home, they killed his dog and sprayed grafitti on his walls, and he says to me: "but these demons do not believe in God! I could kill one but then I would wind up in jail! What world is this that ends up being such a sad, miserable godless world!" Is this really what Jean-Luc Nancy is saying? Is he just being so smug and intellectual, not merely a conceited bastard, but one who really under his cool, calm and collected skin is screaming because he is more alone than he could ever tolerate? This is the fate of modern academia in its polite condemnation: "the exterior is fake; there is no "beyond being;" there is no "good;" there is no God!"
God will comfort us if we need comfort. During the rest of the time we choose to live in a world with a vague recollection of the immense power of the spiritual realm... and if possible to forget it. Only when one lies in the void, at times when one is no longer able to write anything at all, when one is ripped away from the computer keyboard, the stenographer's pad and pen, the easy notebooks, the check-books, the balance books (ah, but those last two are truly in hell) can one begin to live the real life that is beyond this book. It's not fair, as if the book (or it's electronic equivalent) in this estimate were only representations of the true life, and that the true life comes after. But a book or words or writing has as much to do with reality as it seems we are capable of speaking or writing about a reality beyond this reality.
If this reality itself is not a metaphor for some other reality that we have only begun to know as "the outside" (something to which we might sacrifice, which Nancy criticizes in his article "The Unsacrificeable")... but then equally it comes to show that writing cannot be aught but metaphor for itself: writing itself can change no one, for these are just marks in a book or on an electronic tablet: and the goal becomes an illusion, the goal that has always been: that you will be a different person after you have read these words: that these words themselves will change, not just outer reality, as if to say "Apple" will not also change you:
Oppermann probably sent me a post card with Cezanne's apple painting like this
I have always had difficulties with Cezanne.
Who changes? What changes? When we evoke the apple it appears on the web, not just any apple but a Cezanne apple, capable of storing a certain repleteness within its own vision, a better poetic rendering of an apple than a photograph, if the word better means what it does: somehow catching the soul. An apple is not represented here? And what of the lush exteriority of the apple, exterior to the text?Well, you get the message, the sense of what I mean. Or maybe you do not, like you are paralyzed suddenly or you have forgotten how to read. Or maybe it is more like Samuel Beckett's "Calmative" where the man apparently is dead and so he says to himself "I will try once again to tell myself a story" (that is, to bring the world quite round into being believable once again.)
This image should be included because it is beautiful. (The moral "should" the last sentence belongs to the capacity of the father to judge, and may be aligned between Kant's second and third Critiques.) It is a geometrical representatioin of a condition that according to some contemporary thought is "antiquated but beautiful." It is thereby relegated from the realm of science to the realm of aesthetics.Bear in mind the Epithet from one of the final, concluding paragraphs from "A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" when reading the following passage: "Make maps not histories," when Oppermann writes:
"12/26/07 11:20 p. Your birthday is almost over and I havent even written you a post card yet! Presumably Deleuze and Guattari would consider maps simply "artificial re-territorializations" or at least sham representations thereof."
This appears to be incorrect Oppermann, though not exactly incorrect: "reality" as opposed to whatever the "artificial" is - is a series of flows and continuua. Desire can evidently be screwed up into a map as well as any other place. It is not necessary to make the mistake of "representing" (which in this moment sounds like some valence described from Foucault's "Order of things"), which would be an error from the start, but the map sets out on the road to becoming just as the orchid sets out on the road to becoming a wasp etc.... we are on the road to becoming music, and that, once again is an intersection with the Third Critique: becoming sublime. This may be a passage away from "the unsacrificeable" the gesture in the face of this whistling wheezing grimace of a face of a man in despair, after all what does it mean when we face a man who denies that there is a healing magic in everything and say "God bless you!" but that "You will become the music; and the map will become your music and your music will become a map by which to seek the road you sought again."
But I digress. Oppermann goes on to say:
"But I'd be hesitant to say much about what is produced in 1660, a time that is not revealed to the discourse of the early 1970's"
(Actually I think Jung had already had a dream where he had a dream where he was stuck in the 16th century, the 1500's I presume, doomed to having to study the course of alchemy throughout his life. Still I think it perhaps a bit snapped off on my part to make this comment. I have already spoken of Harvey Rabbin who regarded Seneca as a contemporary philosopher. Just how much do we have to make ourselves revealed to anything? After all Deleuze and Guattari considered dates merely as a kind of signature of an intensity: a specific valence of flow. The intensity is not reducible to any other intensity, but one may find it possible, credible, that in order for one to conceive of it at all [I think this is the Anselmian (1033-1109) ontological argument for the existence of God: God must exist as some sort of non-contradictory reasonable condition: "that than which nothing greater can exist" otherwise it will not be God; however Anselm irritates me because he was taught to me by an irritating Jesuit priest, Fr. Leo Sweeney at Loyola in 1991]: in order for anything to exist we must in some manner conceive of it. But that is all that is required in the same breath. Perhaps Jean-Luc Nancy would have a fit with that one, but then again, exteriority to "being" was not one of the aspects Anselm was trying to attribute. Deleuze and Guattari in "Anti Oedipus" refer to God, I believe, while discussing the "Body without Organs" as "Only as the god of the disjunctive sylogism," I am still trying to wrap my mind around that.
"... I'm trying to say: what is in your memory, re-collecting or even de-collecting, of your own childhood (and perhaps your 9th birthday for example)? Is the re-territorialization of imaginal memory "artificial?"
Things are remembered according to desire, which is not at all the same as individual's or ego's desire, but rather is the desire of some terrible mechanism of the "self" (sorry to use that Jungian term, it will truly condemn me to another 20 years for not being Jung, but rather some sort of Jungian- Bah!): after all, you were the one laying there when the world ceased to exist back on the 25th of December. That was real, and that was a more concrete expression of desire than we generally are capable of receiving. If I need to remember my 9th birthday, then I will, but not just because it is somehow commanded: we can never command memory according to desire any more than we could command love or real desire to ever manifest without its own will or way.
"What are the criteria here? And who is enough of a madman here to declare this question "fascist?"
This last passage strikes me as slippery: at first I would easily jump to question any criteria but that of a certain voluptuous enjoyment of desire: pleasure itself, but not necessarily pleasure for the human Dasein is involved. I like to think of some green tentically thing having pleasure here, or Thomas Hobbes' version of society as some great ocean squid, a Leviathan or the vision of Job, the Behemoth, "Behold now the Behemoth, which I made with thee!" Or the immense and extremely smelly eagle named Zazz or something like that is having pleasure. We most of the time simply lie down and take it, or get plucked up and eaten by it, or write web logs about it, or delude ourselves about it, or something. It doesn't matter if the question is fascist if you are being eaten by a hundred-thousand-story bird.
"The discourse of Anti-Oedipus, a book I know you treasure, is strangely dated, and that is not a criticism."
I think that is beautiful. This datedness to me has to do with the sense we have that time itself and reality itself is changing. Enough said.
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