HOLLOVV: ]]>apophaticrevelations replied to your quote: Deleuze’s appeal to...

hollovv:

apophaticrevelations replied to your quote: Deleuze’s appeal to Spinozism at various points of…

In a way that only good academics can understand. They need to be spoken to in their own fumbled tongues. Do you think there is a way to do this?

See this has been my problem all along (as a reader of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Deleuze) and an antinomy that seems totally impassable sometimes (wouldn’t you agree?). I tend to take the Nietzschean route on this one (it’s always served me well in the past) - that to merely hold fast in your point instead of being dragged into a discourse (that is framed by these polemics and emotive reactions) and implicitly damn someone’s argument through sheer proof, ie close reading, interpretation, and sheer force of style seems to usually work.

To be truthful, I don’t know… This hasn’t been working lately in my case, and it seems like a great deal of reactionary sentiment is perusing around the rims of academia and getting out into ‘culture’ at large. What do you think, more public engagement a la Sartre (though his ideas, I’m sure, were bastardized in the course of this)? Or more indifference and faith in oneself a la Nietzsche? Although I guess they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.

That’s the seeming damned-if-you-do/n’t that every one of our favorite maladjusted thinkers (and what thinker isn’t maladjusted?) has had to take a decisive stance on. The only other option, let’s face it, is paralysis. And it isn’t paralysis that scares us, but the meaninglessness therein. It is almost too much to face mortality’s void; we needn’t haunt our lives with another.

But for as long as we put off making this fundamental decision, we are haunted by the threat of meaninglessness. There seems to be no space between Zarathustra and the Hermit, between authenticity and alienation, between engagement and isolation, between the primacy of the Other or solidarity with oneself.

Most of my favorite thinkers, when presented with these two alternatives, have swiftly and unrepentantly affirmed authenticity: Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, those two great exceptions to everything, are paragons of this way of life. Socrates, too, perhaps, along with all the other philosophers whose mutant-pride (it’s 2011, I can make X-Men references, ok?) attitude didn’t sift as well through the sands of time: Diogenes, Heraclitus, and countless other forgotten weirdos.

Of course you’re right: the two choices aren’t mutually exclusive. Sartre tried to find this space, I think.. and most of the time it seems like he failed. Let’s not forget that Heidegger gave it a shot as well, he just came out for the wrong team. Really wrong. Whoops. Blooper.

As for me, I’m trying to solve this essential dilemma myself. At the moment, I feel strongly that by rooting philosophy strongly in lived experience we can avoid this painful dichotomy altogether. When I speak of death, even the worst sophist feels, in their own way, at least one pang of palpable dread. And from there we can proceed. It is my hope that the case is similar with other elements of the human condition (however unpopular a notion that may be): ecstasy, love, and nausea, just to name a few.

I am often told that this is philosophically passe, that even these limit-experiences must be inscribed within contexts, within a context of patriarchal philosophical history, within a context of time and place, space and race. These events are inscribed within so many contexts that they lose whatever about them was exceptional, that they become beholden to contingency rather than necessity. These things I cannot deny. And yet I remain convinced, perhaps hypnotized in a post-mystical fervor, that such limit-experiences remain disclosures of being, privileged points of puncture that sing and seduce us to Being, to the direct consideration (and possible thematization) of existence, to every midnight reflection, to that mark of Cain that the exceptions like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard bore so proudly. Only one question remains, .. how to speak the midnight hour?

—>

(Source: autochthones)