Thanks for a very fine review of Illuminatus!

I’d like to know… that animal machine analogy of man… in what text did you read that??

What I have read about man-animal-machine, is of the ‘becoming’ of man and animal and the machine that together they construct…

Thank you,

‘i consider the universe to be a clever fake…?’

thanks,
a

“…and her intuition, then grew. A sense of the finitiness of the world around her. The streets and houses and cars and shops and people. Sixteen hundred people, standing in the center of a stage. Surrounded by props, by furniture to sit in, kitchens to cook in, cars to drive, food to fix. And then, behind the props, the flat, painted scenery. Painted houses set further back. Painted people. Painted streets. Sounds from speakers set in the wall. Sammy sitting alone in the classroom, the only pupil. And even the teacher not real. Only a series of tapes being played to him.”

(p. 198 of the 2003 Gollancz edition)

I think what you’re doing in your two blogs is very interesting, by the way.

The original is a D&G ad to which I added, using Photoshop, an “other” D&G layer.

You can download it from here

I am really worried about one thing … does simulacra has any similarity with Derrida’s deconstruction?

share the answer if you feel free…

rizwan
rizku_eng@yahoo.com

Dig this post, muli. Its very innaresting…

They were expected to sell out within a few days…

Trust me, you won’t even know when you can’t and you miss it.

Once, I got a one word comment by an anonymous. It said: boring.
Immediately, I deleted the post.

Thanks for reading and for these kind words. I do remember why I started blogging in the 1st place back in 2005. I think u have a mail by this subject…
All the best

Great to have you back!

Thanks!

i read your entry about Blanchot/Bataille – it’s highly interesting – thanks for reminding this community of Acephale.

greetings,
muli

By the way I stole Deleuzes commentar to Foucault from your article about Levinas for the titleline of my blog.
There I also have a review of Maurice Blanchots “The Unavowable Community” (to bad it’s in poor english because this is not my mother tongue). He was one of Levinas best friends – what’s interesting, because Levinas, as well as Blanchot and Bataille had some strange passion for death, what also comes out in “The Unavowable Community”.

greetings,
and thank you for your great blog!!

It’s your allusion to Hemingway (plus your own story) that I carry along with me, and that you can find in the title of this post, as I assume you have already guessed.

I like very much the paradox embedded in your personal story, i.e. that facing death is like facing a book, and that in both cases we’re talking about a different time, a time which is no longer used as a parchment for writing down our memories; a time no longer used for creating meaning through memory, i.e. through the recognition of an already stored pattern.

Rather, before death, just like before the book, we find immediatism. Death and books are those providing a full, one-time meaning for each time capsule. Funny, but it is in death that time is finally used for experiencing the present, rather than for the archival of already gone moments.

I think that this is an old story too, for no one can see God and stay alive. Immediatism kills, but that’s only while being on the ordinary time axis: death and books have their own time.

au revoir et merci

La littérature c’est une manière de reprendre ces mots aussi, de leur redonner un sens. Que le deuil se résume au mot “Condoléances” est une fin, une tête d’épingle de sens et de sincérité, mais aussi un début, une finale en forme d’ouverture..
Maintenant les mots parfois reprennent leur sens. Le lieu commun est réinvesti, redécoré. Comme chez Beckett qui n’utilisait presque pas d’images..
Lorsque j’ai rencontré le deuil dans ma vie, tous les moments alors me paraissaient uniques, importants. Plus rien ne se répétait, les mots à nouveau dépouillés de leurs vieilles images d’habitudes et leurs ennui.
Lorsque je lis de même chaque instant se dépouille de sa répétition pour rentrer dans la sensation..

Alors pourquoi les mots de la littérature seraient jamais portés? Peut-être au contraire, par le tour de l’art, deviennent-ils comme neufs.

Do I hear any questions? the end of dialogue. I have written what I have written. Entropic death. Ends and means, “mean, faced Christian sons-of-bitches” if I remember correctly, storing up their riches for the afterlife eternal… like mummied clones.

Into space. Flying dreams held a special place in Burroughs’ dreams (My Education). The wings are irrigated by desire (Zeus equates desire with a flow) in Socrates’ palinode.

Desire is stoachistic. Spinoza calls desire a kind of striving, unconscious of time (Book three of the Ethics).

“Its the same with men
as with horses and dogs
nothing wants to die…
Boys, you’ll have to find your own way home”
Tom Waits, “The Fall of Troy”

The interesting paradox in Phaedrus is the place of writing, written. The palinode Socrates gives (ostensibly to the gods) is written by another, (the blind) Stesichorus (whose eyesight was restored after composing the palinode), the son of Euphemus (“fair speaker”). And the fanciful tale of Thoth and the King of Thebes is fabricated (the creator cannot see the true utility of his creation because he is blinded by love – so says the King of Thebes in refutation to Thoth: “Your invention is a potion for the jogging of the memory, not remembering.”)

Et in Arcadia ego.
Monad – body and soul.
Relation to self. Techne. Art.
The body signified ” – and often I have asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
“L’art pour l’art…” Twilight of the Idols. The image signifier…

Truth, Beauty, Love.
Substance, Modes, Attributes.
Philosophy’s object remains the same: the eternal recurrence of the same.

A hard saying. Nothing wants to die. Like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it can be forgotten.

I am emale, willing and abel…

“I am he who dies when he is not loved” Nijinsky

The destination of stories, compiled into a book called the Bible, a collection of historical documents. The experts tell me Homer’s stories fulfilled a function for the ancient Greeks similar to the Bible’s use today as a source of moral and spiritual teachings. Time capsules buried and unearthed, raised beyond the death of the author, exposed to the sun, raised to a visibility in an era of Enlightenment. If Enlightenment is characterised by an attitude, rather than an epoch on a entropic time line.

We write our own book for the present. Like Joyce’s Ulysses (re)wrote the Greeks for the Irish (a collective delirium of race – sons and daughters of Cain, bearing the mark: Finnegan’s Wake is concerned with the Fall into language), we write (hopefully IE virtually) for a people who do not yet exist. Kafka and his Mouse People.

Writing? the miraculating body without organs. Creating something out of nothing – a quantum phenomenon wherein an object’s value is inseperable from the measuring apparatus. We humans, attribute value to things. The mind is our excellence. And men and women find no greater joy than in exchanging ideas with other men and women, giving ourselves up to language. An increase in affect(a)tions – virtue is a doingness, a becoming, infinitive present participle, a doubling.

I am emale, willing and abel. Abel was a shepherd, the iconic figure of Arcadia, the pastoral setting. Lying in the fields all day, enjoying the sun, offerring his best lamb in a sacrifice to God and God was pleased by his sacrifice…
Et in Arcadia ego. Poussin
Cain took his revenge, murdered his brother after they had spoken and when God asked him where Abel was, Cain, a farmer who brought forth the fruits of the earth, replied, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
For the company we keep… God placed a mark upon Cain’s forehead so all people would recognise his sin. The Fall repeats itself.

Barthes: Jamais portes. A challenge to raise ourselves above the Fall (words cannot express the feelings I have for the death of my friend), we cannot help but repeat, a will to power, willing and abel, eternal recurrence of the same, the return to language…

“I’ve hurt the ones I love
but I’m still raising Cain” Tom Waits

I am emale, working through the meaning of these parabolas, drawing connections via methods and black squares, muli, my esteemed friend, to which I always return, willing and able.

Peace and love
Ecko

Exchange. Answers?:

For the others? For myself? For the book?

For the others? Time is the Other. Writing – engraving on Time; it’s on the Others that we write, and so it’s the Others that we erase by writing. We cover them up with sand and mud; we place them inside a time capsule, a parchment made of rhizomic letters, and then we stuck them deep inside an eckoing burrow… We, the time killers.

For myself? myself – this volatile, virtual Sorge for the Other, for Time; myself: this Abel (hebrew-> nothingness) passing through the bible for two brief moments just to become death, to represent the pure question of death, the first death – I don’t think we take the time to write for Abel. probably it is Cain, the eternal nomad, marked by the question, for whom we take the time to write. We create in the memory of the first time killer.

For the book? probably “I” wishes to become Time. But it can well be that “I” is enslaved here and now to the own desire of the book, of me-me, of Time, of the all possible Others. The revenge of the buried capsules.

Thank you ecko, a dear other, for your questions and for your answers.

The Ek-stasy of the carnival:
Outside time, a transport. A time for play – not work or production, incalculable activity without ends, telos, death.
The economy of time is the first process to come under the control of capitalism. Marx, the Grundrisse.
Every one consumes.
“X” marks the spot.
A paradoxical time for the other in the primary process of desiring-production.
“Finally, we, the dead…”
… a striving, a-desiring, unconscious of death, ends, goals – a teleological suspension of the ethical.

That’s laughter: an uncontrollable seizure.
The sad clown. Kafka with his wicked sense of humour, rarely allowed himself to laugh aloud and he never spoke an excessive word.
K and the priest in the Trial. A guard stands at the door.
Death. The door is closing now…
all you had to do was ask the question.

Hamlet – a play, a tragedy: to be or not to be – that is the question.
Weighty questions of gravity, duty, existence.
The weight of the cross on Being, pressed down by the hand with an opposable thumb that holds the pen.

“If only I keep this little matter just lightly concealed with my hand…”

Man looked back towards his origins for the meaning of human existence and saw that way was blocked now – by an ape.

“Esteemed gentlemen of the academy! You have done me the honour of asking me to present a report to the academy concerning my past life as an ape. I regret to say that I find myself unable to comply with your request thus formulated…”
Kafka

Build a burrow underground.
Transport. The end of the book. The beginning of writing.
Writing menaces the breath, the spontaneity of communication.
Incorporate a time capsule. Bury it in the earth.
A prescription.
A written formula.
Time is the Other
(of “space: What you damn well have to see.” Joyce)
A strange statement

A shibboleth…

Tout autre est tout autre.
Quote unquote.
Derrida. From the Gift of Death.

Speaking of Bataille, I use “Mr Nietzsche” in a silent tribute to Bataille’s “On Nietzsche.” It skind of a means of distanciation in referring to a writer who detests followers.

“I live – if I choose to see things this way – among a curious race that sees earth, in chance events and the vast interconnectedness of animals, mammals, and insects not so much in relation to themselves – or the necessities limiting them – but in relation to the unlimited, lost and unintelligible aspect of the skies. Theoritically, for us happy beings, MR Nietzsche is a secondary problem… Though there exists…”

Can there be such a thing as a Nietzschean? I find this conundrum to be analogous to the following of a man called Jesus who lived and died over two thousand years ago: the Christ and his Christians. In other words, what is an author? remaining faithful to the spirit of the text, I deny the existence of Jesus, the Son of God, as much as Zarathustra the prophet (such can be found in zealous interpretations of Nietzsche’s work – and malignment of his work too as in Nazi Germany)

“Nietzsche is the only one to support me: he says WE. If COMMUNITY doesn’t exist, Mr. Nietzsche is a philosopher.” Bataille

Bataille wrote this book in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Its an interesting book, alone and bereft of friends as he is at this time and elsewhere in the city, Picasso is painting, “entertaining” the Gestapo, also living alone, creating alone, not afraid of dying alone, but of dying without having communicated something of themselves, in(-)visibility.

At times I get this fear too as do you I gather from your comment on A Marginal Correspondence with Methods and Black Squares, “this hole created after days of not writing.”

“So let’s leave Mr Nietzsche and go on…” The Gay Science

Peace and love
Ecko

The ends of man lies in the margins, a footnote on the work.

The author is not dead. The machine is dead. Why risk the life of the feline? Build a body without organs.

The Author is dead. Rest our interpretations.

One of your comments, or was it one of my comments to one of your comments, or to one of your posts (I am [deliberately] losing tracks of the philosophy at these margins) raised the theme of the I, which ignited an association in my head to Bataille’s story of the eye. And so I googled for images of “story of the eye” and stumbled upon Man Ray’s cut off eye.

Best wishes
muli

“Too abstract… or not abstract enough” write Deleuze and Guattari.

While there is great potential for technology to be used against the State (the weblog, to nominate one example), the fundamental metaphysical relationship lies with the Word itself and the idea of “virtuality” made popular in films like the MAtrix, only serve to reinforce the privilege accorded to speech over writing, “keeping it real,” re-inaugurating the sovereign subject (speech) across space and time: control societies.

To the realists… The virtual lies in the abstract, real without being actual. Daniel W. Smith’s Introduction to Deleuze’s “Essays: Critical and Clinical” is a wonderful exposition of this idea of a becoming in literature.

There’s a lot to be said for the power of parody (see Cultural Parody Centre). Incipit parodia! Thus wrote herr Nietzsche… Its pretty goddam cool some of the stuff that crops up on Dejan’s site and your website. I am emale, a geek, compared to this stuff. It took me six months to work out what the RSS is (oh, its a proud, proud day). And maybe I’m just acting like a geek, sticking to what I know, labelling the Matrix of the cyberpunks (I’m referring to Craig Baldwin and other “shadowrunners” – not yourself or Dejan) as fetishists in a move analogous to Spivak’s labelling of Deleuze and Foucault as “fetishists” for similar uses of the “machine.”

But you know what? Spivak is right – there is a danger of taking all this talk about “power” and “desiring machines” and making it work in the same old repititive politicking apparatus. History repeats itself – see the “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.”

Without a look at the history behind the concepts and work of Deleuze, one riskes coming away with a facile interpretation, amenable to one’s own conservative and narcissistic agenda (well, I did anyway in the unit of “Virtual Cultures” … ow! Didn’t make too many new friends in the media and journalism faculty! Probably best to stick to what I know).

Lacan once said that psychoanalysis can be like a ready-made delirium. Its like thinking Burroughs glorifies or condemns the use of heroin. His novels really have nothing to do with it whatsoever apart from its use as a sign. That’s what literature is about: metaphors. Sit venia verbo. To resign ourselves to the surface of things – those people I call deep: aesthetic – not ascetic – working by reason of feeling, not intelligence. But lets not take ourselves too seriously and label ourselves “stupid”… us, the mouse-people.

Everyone has a fundamental right to stupidity. Thus spake Zarathustra.

To the cyberpunks – “You have to ask yourself, punk” – I give the immortal words of Dirty Harry and Murakami… what kind of idea are you?

Two more things: I have 8 posts around this text of Foucault. I might publish them (beware). This text has it all. Maybe all texts have it all, like monads do. The Time Capsule, of course, comes from this text, Constantin Guys being a collector of those rare moments.

But, the important thing is not the detection of those fine moments, or the detection of the sublime in those; the important thing, according to MF, is to extremely respect any Time Capsule, even those (and even especially those) explicitly stating the absence of the sublime.

Life is tough and so are your texts, ecko. Rest assured, though, I fight with every line.
y.t.
muli

1. The time capsule decomposes – its in our blood now, it affects our whole system by its presence: the eternal present… As Derrida put it in Given Time: “let us begin with the impossible. Later.” To differ and to defer, tracking the singular electron if only in its truth-effects if not as cause and effect. Its a tendency a force in between – it is not a point in time and space one can put into Cartesian coordinates
2. Putting it into words – I love those who write in blood.
3. Place those words in a context of dialogue. Opening the flows, keeping the blood pumping, the passions burning, the soil turning. We enjoy the fresh air in the blogosphere instead of the musty confines of an institution. But there is a field of perpetual interaction between the two.

We all tend to our gardens, cultivating a little. You have to keep the tools sharp and clean.
Some people have royal gardens that are a place for tea parties and gazebos, the sort of gardens requiring professional gardeners.
(I always liked that little story from the Western Lands when the gardener assassinates the tyrant after years of undercover work, getting closer every day while the whole time sharpening the point to his blade.)
Others have sustainable, self-sufficient little backyard numbers, a setting for talk of substance and wine of goodness (intoxication is a necessary condition for art to occur! in vino veritas) – the gardens of delights perhaps but I’d like to cultivate an Epicurian garden. One where we can speak freely without being under erasure, bearing our own double crosses. Perhaps it is impossible but, in effect, we can tend towards it.
Another space and time – there is a season for all things. Given Time. Appreciate your post, Muli. Always a pleasure to Read and to Write Methods and Black Squares.

I remember my reading of Theaetetus. The text appeared to me like a quest, a description of a challenge placed before the brave knights of the Holy Grail, logos being as elusive as that grail they were after. In that platonic version of the legend, you have to successfully complete three consecutive missions before it can be said that you know something, one of the missions being inherently impossible, but, heck, that’s the thrill, the fascination of this entire logos game.

1. Decompose the concept into its constituents.
The first mission is a mission impossible one, and from it, if I’m not wrong, the philosophers’ substance had come to exist.

2. Put what you’ve got into words.
Linguistic turn? You kill me! It happened thousand of years ago. Unwordy knowledge is an unworthy one.

3. Place those words in a context of a dialogue.
If there’s no interlocutor, there’s no knowledge (and I assume that some members of the language as a virus connection, would especially like this third mission, insisting that here lies the foundations of the great viral distribution mechanism of that virus which is the word, logos, word virus)

Blogging – finally, we got the platform to become knowledgeable. The Writer needs the Reader for the third mission, for otherwise s/he will remain an empty vessel.

Prompted by your mention of Kafka in “Questions…” I have just finished reading Kafka’s story, “Josephine: A Songstress” this morning. The point in writing – and by writing, I mean recording, creating a memory that is writing in the broadest possible sense – is I believe, well-encapsulated in this metaphor of the “Mouse People” and the writers relationship to the reader is the same as Jospehine’s to the Mouse People. Its a “problem” that concerns us still today.

Actually, when writing down this thorny post, as you call it, the title of your post Die, Philosophy, Die! became comprehensible for me, reader.

Author(ity) – yes. All those deaths (God, Father, Author) have authority as their victim. Authority [control] needs distance [space], and distance requires time to get from A to B. But the Electric Age is timeless. Hence the collapse of meaning, authority included (actually, authority collapsed first – la tête la première, to use some Candide observations).

I am (still) very cautious with Derrida. His voice… deconstructs my ability to go behind the lines of his words. I’m living on Audio (Oh Dieu, odieux, audieu), and Derrida has an erased voice, unlike the rest who I usually mention. In his writing style, he is less of the genre I’m speaking of – the genre of the literary philosophers. But I’ll find my way to him, slowly, going in circles, picking a fruit here a fruit there. Currently I’m juggling with the concepts he used or rebranded, many of them, deconstruction being the flagship, containing a Schrödinger’s Cat, dead and alive, ways that lead nowhere, and so forth. From the ends of man I took the political grounds of any philosophical congregation. In those two signs – politics and paradoxes – I currently see some similarities to the others.

Foucault, indeed, was a physician, claiming to be interested only in relations never in substance, such as truth. There’s this kind of people who will always get to the point or wish to get to the point. There’s this other kind of people, myself, yourself, most probably, included, who will never get to the point. Actually they will avoid, as much as they can, getting to the point, circling forever around and around, telling everything they can about the suburbs, hoping that through that the city will be revealed – by itself.

long-lasting philosophical questions, such that retain their quantum potential, are to be found in literature in particular, in poetry – in an even greater particularity, and in art in general. Western Philosophy, capital P, Capital Philosophy, used to open the Box and peep inside, like in a trial, sentencing the poor cat by describing his state in a pure atomic sentence.

Anyway, Foucault was basically of the opinion that every writer needs an “unspoken” tradition or interlocutor. And, of course, there is much resemblance between Spinoza’s Ethics and Foucault’s conception of power as immanent, diffuse, etc. probably in much the same way as his work resembles Weber’s social theory on values and beliefs shaping individual choices in a rational framework – and what constitutes the rational and true in the exercise of human freedom, the processes of subjectification, is the proper object of a political philosophy – such as Foucault’s.

Maybe Weber “stole” from Spinoza too…

“The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy. Even love of life is still possible, only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman that causes doubt in us… Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and ‘know’ everything.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Muli, I like this time capsule idea. I think of it, not only as an actual time capsule one buries in the ground for excavation by future generations a la Foucault, but also as a drug capsule, a capsule to swallow, that intoxicates.

I remember Burroughs saying he could stare at the end of his shoe for hours on end when he was high on junk. Time was never a problem – it was kind of buried. This was a fundamental tenet of his “theory” of control and what the metaphor of junk serves for in the life the ugly american leads, the lives we all lead. (I put “theory” in inverted commas because I’m uncertain whether or not I could call his thought put into words anything as “rational” as a theory “to understand and ‘know’ everything – as you say, interpretation is dangerous)

There is no death for the life of the junky – at least as I understand death as opposed to life for I do not call heroin addiction living in the active sense of the word. Only the hourglass of junk, junk time, the “Algebra of Need”: “Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of Time.”

Issues of control, measurement and need, ends and means. “Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in.” Formula for Bergson’s “Creative Evolution. Since the ancient Greeks, authenticity and death have been closely linked – hell, even the ancient Egyptians and probably since the conceotion of the first word-gesture.

Life is an active principle. One has to take a chance, to risk death which means we have to (re-)invent ourselves, to create a memory for ourselves for that is what a culture is, to encapsulate a set of values over time, over generations, beyond any one’s given death.

(And should we make a gift of death? in writing and interpreting there is hazard, a death, the death of the author, as Barthes called it – and what will become of the Word? Will the author make it through the Land of the Dead? Will Baudrillard be remembered in a hundred years? Will Foucault? Will we?).

By the way, thanks for the Burroughs clip. Very cool.

matter in a form gives text power.

great idea

“It is a fundamental law of all healthy criticism that it applies to a work the very principles which it itself employs in its own construction.” Lacan

“To breed an animal with the right to make promises – is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?… Forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine…” Nietzsche

I put these quotes side by side – remixed if you will – to try out an understanding of the Voice as you say. The DJ Spooky quote is more interesting the more it is repeated (a possible criterion for an authentic voice?). The Lacan quote is a good principle of literary criticism in the face of a lack of authenticity, an Author-God Function, guaranteeing the meaning of the written (-spoken) Word. (My god, my language is very formal – sorry, its been awhile since I spoke of these sorts of things!)

The Nietzsche quote is just for fun…

DJ Spooky could be interpreted in several ways. Today – as an eternal present, presently, or the actual date, as in today, as you are reading (hearing) this? Interpretation is no longer valid on the principle of authenticity as Barthes’ Death of an Author would have it (just going on your two quotes and my long-term memory of this excellent text), authenticity being a full and original presence, as opposed to a fake.

I wonder if DJ Spooky – whose work I am wholly ignorant of – has ever heard (the voice) of Barthes? Regardless, judging from his appellation – “DJ” – I could conceive of DJ Spooky in the least everyday example of his quote, sampling other people’s voices for remixing purposes, as practiced by Burroughs and his friends (with all the potential to create a new voice etc, or in the words of Deleuze, a refrain).

Today – on this day, February the Thirteenth – you have given Barthes a new voice upon my reading of your blog entry – even if I’m not understanding you correctly, properly, authentically IE hearing you, across space and time, your writing invokes the voice of conscience, brings to mind, makes a connection – for what is “critical for our survival, our progress” – another quote from an essay close to Barthes’, Foucault’s “What is an author?” wherein he repeats the words of Beckett – “‘what does it matter who is speaking,’ someone said, ‘what does it matter who is speaking?’”

For the processes of individualisation in forms of accountability are what are at stake here, perhaps moreso today in the era of ‘control societies’ than in any others (see “Distributed in space, ordered in Time”). Many critiques of so-called “post-structuralists” deplore the lack of an authentic voice and I think you have given a nice reading of Barthes, applying the “very principles which it itself employs in its own construction” in the context of “today” IE DJ Spooky as a voice of the day, this day, this epoch, and remained faithful to the difference Foucault voices in “What is an Author?”:

“There seems to be an important dividing line between those who believe they can still locate today’s discontinuities (ruptures) in the historico-transcendantal tradition of the nineteenth century, and those who try to free themselves once and for all from that tradition.”

Jan