RADIAL

Often to tease me, my best friend, who is also a scholar in his own right, likes to tell me that he doesn’t know another person who is more ethically conscious than I am. He knows that where philosophy is concerned, ethics and morality are two disciplines that interest me the least. But not, however, if they are entangled with other disciplines, especially theology, or if they are formulated by people who don’t mind writing for those who don’t mind following a tough-going thought. So, obviously, apart from Derrida on ethics and morality, I like everything that Vladimir Jankélévitch has to say, and whom I mentioned before, and what Jean-Luc Marion makes out of obligations that impose themselves on us and that are constituted by something other than our own intentionality.

These days I have been making connections between Marion’s idea that distance creates the greatest intimacy (formulated in his book Idol and Distance) and his discussion of the dynamics of the gaze as a form of love’s intentionality (which I have deliberately left out of my cultural & film studies book Between Gazes; those with a penchant for theological studies will understand my less than interdisciplinary and excluding choice, in spite of my desire to be precisely that, interdisciplinary and not excluding). As to my own ethical standard, yes, I have one, which I like to call radial. “I” as a relational self is like a calculation of the length of an intentional thought to the circumference of a circle. While the trajectory of the thought is straight, a lot of bending goes into the perception of what we think of the other. Ethics for me is allowing for the time it takes to think about the other without a sense of entitlement, and not as an object who fulfils our instinctual capacity to worry – as a mother may worry for her son – but rather as a subject, who in his own separateness teaches me not only the distinction between I as another and me as myself, but also the fact that any act of unconditional surrender requires faith.

For those not familiar with Marion’s thought, here’s a sample from his Prolegomena to Charity (from “The Intentionality of Love").

"Of the face offered to my gaze I envisage only what cannot be seen in it – the double void of its pupils, this void that fills the least empty gaze imaginable – because if there is nothing to see there, it is from there that the other takes the initiative to see (me). Gazing on the other as such, my eyes in the black of his own, does not imply encountering another object, but experiencing the other of the object. My gaze, for the first time, sees an invisible gaze that sees it. I do not accede to the other by seeing more, better, or otherwise, but by renouncing mastery over the visible so as to see objects within it and thus by letting myself be glimpsed by a gaze which sees me without my seeing it – a gaze which invisibly and beyond my aims (invisablement), swallows me up and submerges me, whether I know it or not, whether or not I want it to do so" (82).

"To lay oneself open or to expose oneself to the other means first, outside all visible sensibility, to experience ethical responsibility for the other. If I never rejoin him directly, he always enjoins me, indisputably. He makes his invisible gaze felt and weigh upon me by letting the nonsubjective and nonmasterable feeling of respect be born within me. I know and feel, as if in spite of myself, that I am responsible for the fate and death of my brother" (85).

"The moral consciousness contradicts self-consciousness by counter-balancing the intentionality exerted by the I thanks to the injunction summoning me. The injunction constrains and contains intentionality, intentionality objectifies the other on the basis of the I, but all the same, the injunction summons me on the basis and in the name of the invisible other. […] to love would thus be defined as seeing the definitely invisible aim of my gaze nonetheless exposed by the aim of another invisible gaze; the two gazes invisible forever expose themselves each to the other in the crossing of their reciprocal aim. Loving no longer consists trivially in seeing or in being seen, not in desiring or enciting desire, but in experiencing the crossing of the gazes within, first the crossing of aims" (87).

BONNE CHANCE

For Fabiana Heifetz

I have banging Eros on my head on the way to see Grand Canyon. The one over here, not the one over there. The Hockney thing. So, I walk up the path, and down into the garden, and up again, and past the grill, past the Chinese little girls who start following me saying hi all the time, once they finish rolling in the grass, and past the past. There is a direct line from Hockney’s purple and straight into the bathrooms. And you never know who you can ambush there. Smoke envelops me and I hear the erudite one saying: “Cosmic constellations. There are causal relations that are above us.” I look at him sideways and wonder if he has just been reading Eric Hoffer, who was also into literary orbiting: “We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.” “Is that cosmic enough for you?,” the one still here asks. Ah, the embrace, and the kiss, and the knowledge. “That’s more than enough - I hope.” I say this with strong conviction and emphasis on "hope." Smoke envelops us, and the one who got to me through Derrida, Great Jascha’s relation tells me: “You’re here because I summoned you.” “Oh, really?,” I ask and then she goes: “You know, some women think that Lacan was un hombre muy hermoso.” Echolalia is in the air: “Je dis toujours la verité. C’est les mots qui manquent." – Palavre of the handsome one. “Boof,” the owl goes. “Bufnita” and “polonic” are the best Romanian words. “Are they?,” Borges’s translator wants to know, and she offers “horoscopul” as a worthy competitor. “Of course she “ul”, wouldn’t she?,” I think to myself, and start enumerating the languages that she can speak. Many. “I’ll come to your place and bring luck,” she says. Bon. Meanwhile, all I can think of is the image she offers me: I, as a rich Lebanese heiress in the presence of the king of deconstruction. Some are laughing, some are squinting, and for the life of me, I have no idea what keeps Eros so long.

FLESHED-OUT

For Rainer Kaus

The pathology of big breasts is going out. “Who do you want to look like?” the head plastic surgeon asks me. I know exactly so I answer unhesitatingly. “Well, like those two gnomic gnats, Beckett and Bob Dylan.” “Who,” he asks again? “Beckett and Bob Dylan,” I say, and refrain from offering additional information. This strategy is also part of the program, to keep it simple. I go for the slender androgynous look. My hair will also turn completely white in six months, so I’m ready to face the world in this final phase of my meaningful or meaningless existence. “Say what?” Beckett asks me, and he never makes any conversation that is not based entirely on body language and no words. I say nothing. Ten vectors of ten-second thoughts go through my mind. Number two has this in it: O, yes, yes, of course, why not, how excellent, this is just brilliant, it can’t get any better that next time, when men tell me that they respect me, they will not mean the exact opposite. And they will not look at their watches in my presence either. Dylan intercedes on thought number five: “A poem is a naked person. Some people say that I am a poet.” Good then, we go with that, number one thought dictates, as number one never has anything original to say. My scurrilous intelligence is being performed on at the level of flesh. The less of it, the higher ground. “Have you been reading about Estragon and Vladimir on the verge of hanging themselves only so that they can get a major erection?” Beckett wants to know. But all I say is this: “I disappear a lot,” just when my hand is being twisted by the good doctor who says: “Not bad. Not bad at all.” Dylan goes, “Pressing On,” and I think: Fucking Freud is home.

VANTAGE POINT

Vincent’s last instalment in the series of 6, Power of Thought, this time around, was good. It was good today, and I’m not saying this because 1) as announced previously, I’ve lost my brain because it’s summer, nor 2) because I couldn’t resist Rune Lykkeberg’s dimples and his beaming demeanour, nor finally 3) because I’ve speculated the whole time what the big "V" on Vincent’s chest was doing trying to eat the small "w" on the opposite half of his breast, yet all part of the corporation, Vince-Inc, strategically placed on his buffed up arm. Yes indeed, now that I think some more, the whole thing was good, not only because of what was said, but also, and perhaps rather more so, because I was looking for answers as to why this 6-pack was special, something Vincent said at the outset. None were given, which made me think, this summer day, that the reason why there was a new run is due simply to the fact that I was thought of, and that I should not get bored on my vacation. Well then, thanks are in order, to begin with, for such parallels, however imaginary, between thinking and motives.

The talk today was about truth and how it relates to democracy. While it became clear to me quite early on that Rune is not a Marxist – which almost made me shout at him: ‘get your act together, especially as you obviously are both smart and witty!’ (but, well, as I suggested, it’s hard to shout at a dimpled face) – I liked him for some of the other things he said. That, for instance, when it comes to truth, one cannot merely rely on logical definitions or explanations. As he put it, if truth is to hold, as it were, as a concept, then it must follow some functional, not logical rules. This led to a discussion of values vis-à-vis progressive politics and the inherent paradox that marks the relation between progress and tradition. As he further contended by illustrating, it has now become a tradition for the right wing Danish party, Dansk Folkeparti, to insist on preserving what has now also become a tradition, namely women’s right to go topless on the beach – which initially was the result of progressive thinking. Indeed.

Yet, according to Rune, precisely when one talks of values, one loses sight of what is progressive. Thus collective learning always operates with three variables: money, the state, and talk. Ideally, through talk, the other two should be negotiated for the benefit of all. Vincent thought this was interesting, as he also thought of several other things, but when it comes to how power can be negotiated, verbally or otherwise, neither made the obvious remark that power can be abused, in any setting, and by anyone. So, while nothing is wrong with democracy as such – Rune was more sceptical – we can, in fact find solutions to the process of replacing an old system with a new one – for instance, by verbally denouncing oppressive thinking, or by snatching the power from those who hold it without legitimation through other means. When Rune went, ‘well, obviously there is a problem if we get rid of authority figures, such as old patriarchs, because that means that we get rid of power, and we need power because it helps us hold someone responsible when something goes wrong,' I rather couldn’t help thinking of a number of feminists, queers, blacks, freaks and other marginals who wouldn’t mind taking charge, being in charge, and swapping positions. But somehow, they never get asked. If anything, they are still the ones who get laid off, put into prisons, or bashed, on the grounds that the state requires it.

So, while governments today place emphasis on individual agency, interestingly enough, at the level of the individual taking responsibility for ruining the lives of other individuals through some concrete, yet imbecilic action, we are met with cowardice – ‘I didn’t do it, the state, or the economy did it,’ we often hear the wimps saying – and talks of selection – ‘we put people in jails because we have to protect the good subjects from the bad ones,’ we often hear the righteous saying. And so it goes. Here, Vincent, perhaps to provoke rather than endorse, referred to Plato’s hatred of democracy and horror at the idea that philosophers should take political charge, but this opened question left at least this viewer wondering to what extent going with the strongest argument, which a logician does, is compatible with democratic thinking. More can be said about the aporias of democracy, truth, and the tyranny of neo-fascism disguised as common-sense, but as befitted with my own tradition, let’s end this post with terrorizing Vincent some more with some deconstructive talk, as a way of being grateful, again, for keeping us busy thinking.

In his book Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, my favourite friend, Jacques Derrida, asks this question: "can one and/or must one speak democratically of democracy?" (71) only to conclude that it is not possible, for as he further contends, to do so, "it would be necessary, through some circular performativity and through the political violence of some enforcing rhetoric, some force of law, to impose a meaning on the word democratic and thus produce a consensus that one pretends, by fiction, to be established and accepted—or at the very least possible and necessary: on the horizon" (73).

We like horizons. They always come.

HOLDING SPACE

After the organ recital last night I get it confirmed again and again – not that I need confirmation, some things you just know beyond codes and logic gates – that Bach is the greatest and most generous of them all. The way he allows you to ride on his cosmic spirals and straight into endlessness is unmatched. At least for me.

These days I think of vastness, and after last night I want to say that whatever we call “it”, it’s vast. The thing about vastness is that it exceeds articulation, which means that you cannot even use clichés to frame it, go against it, or approve it. It’s just there for you to sense and touch without even using a hand.

As if to match my thoughts, a friend of mine sends me her latest collection of poems. Rishma Dunlop, a Canadian writer and professor at York University has just published White Album, in which the poems, also a discographic collection, juxtapose not only sounds, of strength and space, but also images, of lucid ground. The painter Suzanne Northcott contributes a visual counterpoint to each poem. I quote the last one, "Stop-time," which is aligned with the painting called "Evening Fields VI."

Whatever we call “it”, we acknowledge it. We hold its space. We bow to it and love it. And wait.

Stop-time

At times I’ve travelled far from you –
brought to my knees by want
in white rooms in distant cities
and always, music phantoms me –
fevered, carnal –
the rock and roll of my youth,
the blues of Clapton and B.B. King,
the jazz dark and peeling,
Miles and Monk and Billie,
the straight statements of gospel,
Mahalia Jackson’s every note a prayer
that reaches me for brief instants,
after dinner at Frederick’s and Robert’s
where gulls were circling,
seven settings of the sun sliding into English Bay.
I stood under the catalpa tree that sang white blossoms unto my hair
and through my fingers and I was home.
Blackbirds in the milk-blue light before dawn
scoring the silence.
Stop-time on the wet embouchure of a trumpet.
Music waiting in a white room,
white on white playing on
in the rabid world, and I your winter queen, your one and only.

Painting: Suzanne Northcott, Evening Fields VI

BAROQUE

In the wake of going to Norway, where I can indulge my major regrets for not having become either this or that – a mathematician, which I’ve always had a fancy for, or a Bach cantatas singer, which I was once – I listen to music which makes me forget about myself.

Here is a sample from a live recording of the original pieces on the CD Baroque Duet: Battle – Marsalis (Anthony Newman, orchestra of St. Luke’s, John Nelson, 1992).

NORWAY: THE SUM OF CONVERGENCES

For Johan Schimanski

Norway! – you make my passions stream through my nostrils while also making me think that whatever thought is, it doesn’t matter.

Norway! – your mossy green sticks to my eyes and your smell hits me hard in my gut turning it into Babylon.

Norway! – I speak your tongue but my phonetic rules are transgrammatical.

Norway! – your sheep and goats acknowledge my presence which makes me grab them by their hind legs and turn them on their heads so that their bleating scores a higher pitch. The less banal is constructed without sacrifice.

Norway! – I want to go to Tromsø where all the boa-deconstructors went. Su-pli-ca-tion. They all believed in supplication. I want to believe in supplication. The boas in the temple of silence, counting on meshless methods.

Norway! – your aurora borealis makes me crazy. Cra-zy. I point three fingers at the absent trees and think that I’m Huldra. Invisible to all, but my own fingers. Your winds touch them, your waters love their caresses, your forests eat them getting intoxicated.

Norway! – if you were not Norway, I would be Norway, allowing tourists and lovers like myself to enter me only on the 12th of the month, each year, each century, each hour. On the 12th hour love time is camping time. The million of Dutch drivers passing through you can testify.

Norway! – I want your peaks to be hot saunas, and your lakes monoi oil on my body.

Norway! I love you, as I spit into your rivers thinking: Panta rhei.

§

GET THE BOOK

ENTHRAL

For Geoffrey

“Thing”: id est, thinking or think’d. Think, Thank, Tank – Reservoir of what has been thinged. – Denken, Danken, – I forget the German for Tank/The, Them, This, These, Thence, Thick, Think, Thong, Thou” Coleridge in his Notebooks didn’t put a full stop after this string. So this is not hermetically closed. Thinking knows no hermeticism. Silent speech aims at a punctum. “AND YET: is not writing too much with us?” asks Hartman in Saving the Text. So, no full stops after the inscription on the body. The palm carries the lines of the “Thing.” I drop my ring into my glass. The thought is not hermetic. Outside my house, near the supermarket, there is a huge circle on the pavement. Every day I’m waiting for “Them” to paint the letter H inside it. The “Thing” is a helicopter. The “Thought” is militaristic: “you are ordered to come now.” And “Thou” shall not ask “This” stupid question again: “Really?” “Danke” I say. For what, I don’t know. I’m saving the revelation for later.

FORCING

My brain doesn’t work in summer, but here’s a thought on Vincent’s penultimate talk in the series The Power of Thought – this time around. The topic is related to political philosophy and the guest is Ole Kværnø who is the director of the Defence Academy. The two talk about current perceptions of war and how they unfold against the background of older definitions of notions such as the state, sovereignty, and civil rights. I like the fact that Kværnø didn’t come to the studio unprepared. And he even addressed the issue of how we legitimate claims to going to war from a philosophical perspective. Symmetry and asymmetry were the main operative keywords in a discussion about structural and normative codes that involve agents going to war not against other agents but against concepts. If in the cold war the situation was one of symmetry where two parties were concerned – each wanted to beat the other leaving from the same premise or using the same intelligence apparatuses – nowadays states such as Denmark go to war also against people who do not possess either the same belligerent culture, or the same military intelligence, or the same type of weapons. Kvarnø made a reference, on the one hand, to Kant, for whom going to war when one state has too much power over another is not a sign of good, ethical and moral behaviour, and on the other, to Hobbes who basically claimed the opposite.

So, yes, the military. What can one say? Things are always quite mechanical where strategies and the like are accounted for in philosophical terms that avoid the work of deconstruction. I was thinking how the whole discussion would have been infinitely more dynamic if Vincent or Kværnø had said something about Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the homo sacer, sovereignty, and how we deconstruct political concepts and show that, at their base, they are secularized theological concepts – which is what Schmitt originally claimed. Agamben, following Schmitt, suggests some pretty intelligent things about the relations: subject against subject and subject against object, when he claims that the "so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterize them as rights of the citizens of a state.” (Means without an End,19-20; revised version in Homo Sacer, 2002). Obviously the consequences of Agamben’s postulate have implications for the way in which we thematize free will – which, just for the record, I don’t believe in myself – and it complicates Kværnø’s statement that governments today, when thinking about going to war, pick and choose as if they were at a supermarket. The association is good, but things are more complex than that. In the face of thinking that just because one doesn’t have a well defined enemy, one can afford to invent things and then go to the supermarket and get the bullets according to the invention, I thought that particularly Schmitt’s idea that “Everything must be forced to the extreme so that it can be overturned out of a dialectical necessity” (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 1924/1988: 59) is relevant to consider for a few seconds. Vincent, who knows about ‘forcing’ even though in another context – will understand what I mean. The rest, enjoy your summers, your Riviera suits, gray soft cottons over white shirts, and white pants – don’t go black – or think strategies, or career moves, by donning dark stripped suits and red ties – don’t forget about human causes though, which you can mark by penetrating your lapels with a pin.

PEEPHOLE

On the plane from Rome to Copenhagen I was surrounded by kids. They were restless and yelling. I thought to myself, you have two options: to be annoyed for 2 hours or go with it. My idea of going with it was to enjoy a bottle of champagne and see what happens. It didn’t take long until a 4-year old, right in front of my seat, turned to see who was sitting in the back. He was looking at me through the crack in the seat, as it were. I pretended not to see him, but smart kids know when you pretend, which for them is a clear indication that you’re in for a game. And indeed I was. We played a game of gazes and hands. Every time I gave him a look, or pretended to grab his nose between two of my fingers he would go wild with laughter. Half of the people on the plane were annoyed at such noise. I could have been one of them. Between the looks and the touches, he would tell me: “you’re so boring.” I told him in return that he was equally boring, and then he went: “and your glasses are so bad.” Then he started serenading me. When he finished with the singing, which involved a lot of yeah, yeah, yeah, and da, da, da, out of the blue he told me: “but you can’t kiss me.” Now, there was a thought. I instantly devised strategies for that act precisely. I succeeded, of course. He looked surprised, but also triumphant. This latter look on his face puzzled me. It occurred to me that he was already ahead of me. It occurred to me also that he wanted me to steal a kiss from him all along. “I’ll be damned,” I thought to myself. “Not bad at all.”

I blamed myself, however, for having missed his intention. I was coming from a psychoanalytical gathering where one never talks about anything other than desire, intention, and attraction, so I should have been faster at registering what he was doing. When we parted, he told me his name was Anton. He gave me a small board to write his name on it as he was spelling it to me. As I put my own name next to his, his mother was thanking me profusely for what she called “fantastic and fabulous entertaining.” I rather thought that I was the one who had a good reason to be thankful. Especially for the kiss. Apparently I was the first. Anton’s father informed me that Anton never let anyone kiss him before. Not even his parents. Ah, such mythical first acts! The thought of being the chosen one grew as bubbly in my head as the champagne, and I didn’t even think it a hassle to drag the heavy suitcases all the way from Kastrup to Roskilde.