Transcendental Enquiries

Masayuki Takayanagi & New Direction

2009-04-22T13:21:00.008+02:00

Tokyo 1970. Freejazz/Noise/Feedback improvisations. Reminds me of an early version of Fushitsusha/Keiji Haino. Released in 1994 on the excellent PSF label.

Incredible how fresh this album sounds. Maybe I just wasn't aware of the existence of this kind of heavy free rock/jazz experiments during the late sixties, early seventies. Could easily have been an Original Silence-album (Mats Gustaffson, Thurston Moore, ...) recorded last year.

try

Kurt Vile

2009-01-24T18:55:00.006+01:00

Lofi songcraft:

Kurt Vile - Space Forklift (mp3) (from the album 'The Constant Hitmaker')

Kant Attack

2008-10-08T16:58:00.001+02:00

Keith Rowe - Prepared Guitar

2008-09-25T12:10:00.001+02:00

2008-09-09T22:55:00.003+02:00

Great, new song by Om on Sub Pop; the first song with drummer Emil Amos (Grails, Holy Sons) after Chris Hakius having left the band. Drumming is little different, maybe somewhat more loose and jazzy (Hakius was a monolithic hardhitter), but it fits Om perfectly. Looking forward to their new fulllength and the possible new directions there heading in (the alternative version of the song reminds me a lot of Grails latest experiments).

OM - Gebel Barkal (mp3)

Masonna - god of noise

2008-08-16T04:29:00.003+02:00

Nothing Essential Happens in the Absence of Noise

2008-08-01T16:09:00.002+02:00

"For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.

Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of Noise."

Jacques Attali

Summer Reading

2008-07-28T11:56:00.004+02:00

Repeating Ourselves. American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice

by Robert Fink

Description
"Where did musical minimalism come from—and what does it mean? In this significant revisionist account of minimalist music, Robert Fink connects repetitive music to the postwar evolution of an American mass consumer society. Abandoning the ingrained formalism of minimalist aesthetics, Repeating Ourselves considers the cultural significance of American repetitive music exemplified by composers such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Fink juxtaposes repetitive minimal music with 1970s disco; assesses it in relation to the selling structure of mass-media advertising campaigns; traces it back to the innovations in hi-fi technology that turned baroque concertos into ambient "easy listening"; and appraises its meditative kinship to the spiritual path of musical mastery offered by Japan's Suzuki Method of Talent Education."

Contents

Introduction. The Culture of Repetition

PART ONE: The Culture of Eros: Repetition as Desire Creation
1. Do It ('til You're Satisfied): Repetitive Musics and Recombinant Desires
2. "A Colorful Installment in the Twentieth-Century Drama of Consumer Subjectivity": Minimalism and the Phenomenology of Consumer Desire
3. The Media Sublime: Minimalism, Advertising, and Television

PART TWO: The Culture of Thanatos: Repetition as Mood Regulation
4. "A Pox on Manfredini": The Long-Playing Record, the Baroque Revival, and the Birth of Ambient Music
5. "I Did This Exercise 100,000 Times": Zen, Minimalism, and the Suzuki Method

T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets

2008-06-18T21:26:00.004+02:00

Eliot reading 'Burnt Norton' (what's that noise?-version)

Alexander Tucker / Alexander Turnquist

2008-06-10T17:16:00.003+02:00

Kantian Ethics as an 'Evental Site'

2008-04-02T12:38:00.006+02:00

As Kojin Karatani rightfully stresses, the time has come for a rediscovery of both subjectivity and rationalism against the prevalent forms of empiricism. Similar to authors as Michel Henry, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Karatani urges us to finally question the contemporary dogma of hermeneutic particularism in favour of a philosophy no longer condemned to an acceptance of the status quo. Especially the parallels with Alain Badiou’s project are striking, but while Karatani labels his project as explicitly transcendental (in a Kantian sense), Badiou turns Kant into one of his main enemies. This paper is the result of a certain wonder about this opposition. Why does Badiou oppose Kantianism so strongly?; is his philosophy not rather a new incentive to rethink the Kantian project and would a more positive relation towards Kant’s idea of transcendental subjectivity not serve well also Badiou’s own project of the rediscovery of universalism? I will not answer these questions head-on, but will focus on two possible types of Kantianism. While Badiou mainly refers to a specific sort of neo-Kantianism fashionable in France, Karatani considers Kant as prefiguring his own brand of postmarxist radicalism. Tracing these directions back to Kant’s own writings, I hope to shed some light on the possibility of overcoming the opposition, together with a better insight into the possible critical power of Kantianism today.

I. Kant versus Badiou

Before we move on to Kant himself, let me first say a few words about Badiou’s relation to Kant. Badiou recognises the importance of the Critic of Pure Reason for banishing the transcendent One from his ontology and so for the laicisation of the idea of infinity. But what Kant banishes from his ontology, he would resurrect in his ethics, succumbing to a strict register of objectified normality. Despite the apparent similarities of their project - both take their point of departure in a radically non-substantialist and supra-sensible idea of subjectivity - Kantian ethics comes to symbolize all what he detests in philosophy today. More specifically, Badiou reproaches Kant ideological conservatism: his ethics of duty and legality would lead to a philosophy of conformity; his nearly exclusive focus on the purity of motives would make any genuine political action beyond the acceptance of the given situation impossible. The main reason for Kant’s conformism is that he would lack an account of the ethical imperative as exceptional: Kant valorises human nature in general, implying a trust in the possibility of resurrecting a once and for all valid system of protecting the general human nature in terms of human rights.[2] The effect is double: first, he solidifies a given order (in terms of legality) as the home of the righteous attitude an thus objectifies right conduct. Second, he also objectifies evil, as that which threatens the stability of the given order. He would even go as far as turning this relation upside down: the a-priori identification of evil becomes the actual touchstone for the solidification of the legal system.[3] In other words, Badiou turns Kant into a very specific enemy: a right-wing conservative. In what follows, I will take a look at Kant’s ethics with these specific accusations in mind: to what extent do Kant’s own texts provoke the accusations and how much room would they still leave us for a different interpretation?

II. A Right to Revolution? (the Legal Picture)

Most accounts of Kant’s ethics almost exclusively focus on the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). This is not without reason, for it contains some of Kant’s most profound ethical ideas and intuitions. Nevertheless, this is only half of the story. Twelve years later, Kant published his Metaphysics of Morals (1979), as an attempt to complete the project of the Groundwork. This part is meant as a short systematic interpretation of the transition and of the ethical position of his later work by way of one specific question: is there a right to revolution? I will call the position discussed here the ‘legal picture’ of Kantian ethics. The ‘legal picture’ is thus not a specific side of Kant’s ethics, which would complement the insights of the Groundwork, but an overall interpretation of his ethical position. In the next part, I will contrast this picture with the ‘moral picture’ of his ethics, although it is noteworthy that the ‘legal picture’ is the one most directly supported by Kant’s texts.

So let’s start with our question: ‘is there a right to revolt, to disobey the orders of a tyrannically government?’ For a positive answer we could take our cues from Kant’s stress on freedom and personal responsibility. This is at least the road Hannah Arendt takes. In her reaction to Eichmann’s claim that he always had considered himself as a Kantian, Arendt points out that the categorical imperative doesn’t allow for a political interpretation. The lawgiver of the categorical imperative is the human subject as an individual: we owe obedience to the moral law that we give ourselves, not to the Führer. Eichmann’s Kantianism was nothing but an extremely cut down version of Kantianism, i.e. reduced to the formula: obey the law. Surprisingly however, Arendt’s own reply is based on a highly simplified version of Kant’s ethics, completely disregarding Kant’s own assertions on the topic of revolution and the disobedience to the lawgiver.

Kant was indeed known for his high appraisal of the French Revolution (he even got the nickname ‘the old Jacobin’), but we should not forget that his own philosophy categorically forbids something as a revolution. As he states himself in 1793, two years before the publication of the Metaphysics of Morals:

“All resistance against the supreme legislative power, all incitement of the subjects to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebellion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in a commonwealth, for it destroys its very foundation. This prohibition is absolute. And even if the power of the state or its agent, the head of the state, has violated the original contract by authorizing the government to act tyrannically, and has thereby, in the eyes of the subject, forfeited the right to legislate, the subject is still not entitled to offer counterresistance.”[4]

Arendt’s reply refers to a certain logic at work in the Groundwork: the universality-test is performed by the individual subject and there are no intermediary stages between application of the moral law and the subject. But this is certainly not the position of the later Kant. In the Metaphysics of Morals the direct authority of the categorical imperative is substituted for a specific taxonomy of duties. In order to know what we ought to do, we do no longer rely directly on a abstract application of the moral law, but we find ourselves in the midst of a whole network of interrelated duties. As we will see, this also explains Kant’s explicit condemnation of the right to revolt.

The most basic division Kant makes is between duties of justice and duties of virtue. The first are the kind of duties connected to juridical laws. These aim at protecting the external freedom of the citizen and only require that we obey them externally; here, we only have to act according to duty and not necessarily out of duty. Duties of virtue are those in which case the lawgiving not only makes an action a duty, but where the duty is at the same time the incentive to obey the law. In contrast with the first, they concern the inner freedom and cannot be coerced. They aim at morality, not at legality. As such, both domains have their own separate system of ‘legislation’: an external system of lawgiving aiming at external lawfulness versus an internal system aiming at action out of duty itself. However, the difference in lawgiving does not mean that both spheres are completely separated. Ultimately, both legislations are founded upon the formal and material dimension of the categorical imperative. Formally, this leads in the sphere of legality to what Kant calls the transcendental formula of right: “Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law.”[5] At the same time, the material dimension comes into play, and thus what is generally called the humanity-formula of the categorical imperative: the protection of the external freedom is founded upon the idea that humanity itself should be treated as an end. Kant thus suggests that the protection of the external freedom is a condition for the flourishing of moral life. Precisely at this point we witness how both spheres become connected: Kant stresses (in Religion within the Boundaries of mere Reason) that we have an ethical duty to overcome the ethical state of nature in order to become a member of an ethical community.[6] In the Metaphysics of Morals this implies an ethical duty to live within a state. This explains why even positive laws are discussed within the context of ethics: although the source of lawgiving remains different from ethics in the strict sense, every juridical duty is also an indirect ethical duty[7], because the worth of humanity itself requires us to respect these laws. In the direct sense, violating a positive law is a crime; indirectly, the violation is also an offence to humanity itself.

Till so far the general distinction. Concerning the possibility of a conflict of duties: Kant thoroughly denies the possibility [for all duties are founded upon reason and there can be no conflict within reason itself. He only admits the possibility of two conflicting grounds of obligation. It remains a little obscure what is meant by the idea of a ground of obligation, but the most sound interpretation seems to be the combination of facts with an action (material circumstances) and relevant duty.[8]] of a conflict a priori, though must admit that conflicts may arise at the level of actual application. Kant hardly discusses any of these kind of conflicts explicitly. Luckily, his theory is robust enough to provide us the criteria to judge those conflicts. The general principle is that a formal principle has precedence over a material principle.[9] The formal principles consist of a principle consistency and universality. The material one refers again to the formula of humanity, as a principle to promote the flourishing of reason and humanity as an end in itself.

Let us go back then to the case of revolution. First, can it be legally justifiable? Kant refuses the Hobbesian idea that it is conceptually impossible for a lawgiver, the sovereign to do injustice. The sovereign is also bound to the demands of natural reason, to the standards of justice founded upon the categorical imperative. This does however not mean that it can be just for us to disobey an unjust law. Once a political regime is installed, the highest authority belongs to the lawgiver, the sovereign and to include a permission to ignore or oppose the given laws would be contradictory. Logically, there can be no legal authority to oppose the highest legal authority. The opposition would have to be based on a higher legal authority and as a result it would deny the fact that in a juridical state the sovereign represents the general will of the people; it would deny the idea of legality altogether. As Kant argues: “For a people to be authorized to resist, there would be a public law permitting it to resist, that is the highest legislation would have to contain a provision that it is not the highest and that makes the people, as subject, by one and the same judgment sovereign over him to whom it is subject. This is self-contradictory.”[10]

If revolution cannot be justified on legal grounds, what about a possible moral justification? Kant’s answer is again negative. As we have seen, duties of justice are indirect also duties of virtue, in the sense that our respect for legality as legality is in itself an ethical duty; and because a revolution would not only undermine the actual system of legislation, but the whole idea of legality, it is also our moral duty to preserve the legal conditions of justice. Even the direct application of the categorical imperative would not legitimate a revolution, for universalising the maxim of the revolutionary shows it as self-contradictory. The argument is similar as above: at the same time it is willed that there is justice and that there be no justice (by denying the highest authority of the lawgiver).[11] The crucial Kantian premise is again that justice demands a highest legal authority, and that from the moment on a sovereign comes to represent the general will of the people, the will of the people is only legally knowable by way of what the sovereign commands. Of course, Kant does not deny that the successful outcome of a revolution might be morally desirable; but Kant is not a consequentialist; moral desirability may never be confused with moral legitimacy. At the same time, Kant’s non-consequentialism does not imply that moral ends do not matter in moral reasoning. To the contrary, the formula of humanity (of the CI) allows us to take ends explicitly into account. It is even part of our ethical duty to work towards a just society in which the freedom of all people is maximised. The idea of a revolution could therefore be supported by the humanity-formula, were it not that formal criteria have always precedence over material.

At a few occasions, Kant however makes room for a kind of disobedience, more specifically when we are commanded to do things that are evil in itself and thus directly opposed to the ethical law.[12] But we should note that this is only a passive disobedience subjected to some specific criteria. First, it only concerns acts which are deemed immoral. Second, the act of disobedience should not undermine the authority of the sovereign, for in that case the passive disobedience would become an active one, undermining the idea of legality. As a result, it remains highly questionable if Eichmann would have been able to disobey the commands of the lawgiver on Kantian grounds: the test of the legitimacy of disobedience fails to meet both criteria. Eichmann was probably more Kantian than he could have ever imagined, at least according to the legal picture.

III. The Singular Imperative (the Moral Picture)

Coming back to Badiou finally: that he opposes Kantianism as a philosophy of duty comes as no surprise. Not completely unlike in some Islamic theologies, Kant’s stress on the radically noumenal and thus transcendent nature of the moral law has an awkward effect: it tends to revert into a quasi making absolute of the given, positive order of law, into an ideologically conservative valorisation of what we can call in Lacanian terms the ‘symbolic order’.

Nevertheless, we are still confronted with a certain paradox: how is it possible that Kant was that enthusiast about the French Revolution, while theoretically condemning all possible sorts of revolution? To one report even “he said that all the horrors in France were unimportant compared with the chronic evil of despotism from which France had suffered, and the Jacobins were probably right in all they were doing”[13] and in The Contest of Faculties Kant himself refers to the enthusiasm for French Revolution as an example of an event that demonstrates the possibility of moral progress. So, at least we still need an understanding of the operations of the categorical imperative which allows us to align Kant’s theoretical innovations with the expressions of his personal belief.

Christine Korsgaard for example, a Kant-scholar and pupil of Rawls, is willing to accept the case of the virtuous revolutionary. She describes this situation as the opening up of a gap in the moral world.[14] As a good, virtuous person caring for wellbeing of the people, the revolutionary takes the law into his own hands. He therefore places himself in a position he detests the most: acting independent of the established procedures of consulting the general will of the people, his stance towards society is one of paternalism and thus despotism. In order to save the procedures of justice, the revolutionary violates his respect for these procedures. The gap itself results from the fact that it remains undecidable from the stance of morality to know when things have gone too far. In Korsgaard’s words: “Morality cannot tell you when to leave the moral law behind, in order to make sure that the world remains a place where morality can flourish. In making this kind of decision, you are entirely on your own.”[15]

But does this really help us out, evoking a kind of Kierkegaardian exceptionality, beyond the ethical? As such, morality remains confined within the logic of legal conformity, destined to function as a complete decision mechanism. Moreover, there is very few evidence in Kant’s own writings for the acceptance of a existential sphere beyond morality. For the time left, I would like to consider the possibility of finding a solution starting from Kant’s own ethical principles. Could there be any legitimation of revolution on Kantian grounds, and what would be the outlook of such a Kantianism? My intuition at least, is that there could be serious evidence for pro-revolution stance, though only at a high cost: condemning the Metaphysics of Morals as unKantian – Kant failed theoretically to apply his own transcendental principles – or reading it as a political work of absolute faithfulness to the event of the French Revolution: the prohibition of revolution concerns possible counterrevolutions[16] and should not be read as a general philosophical theory (it’s the work of a situationist). Anyway, in both cases we have to explain why the Metaphysics of Morals should not be read as a sound Kantian philosophical theory.

The closest we came to a possible legitimation of revolution on Kantian grounds was by reconnecting it directly to the categorical imperative, and more precisely to the formula of humanity: a revolution could be seen as necessary in the light of our duty to promote the flourishing of humanity as an end in itself. Nevertheless, formal criteria overrule material criteria, and our case failed to pass the formal test of the categorical imperative: the maxim of revolt resists universalisation. But does it really? The crucial question is still how maxims are to be articulated in the application of the categorical imperative.[17] Let us take a more simple example, discussed by Kant himself: the possibility of lying. The case goes as follows: someone knocks on your door and asks if your friend, who is hiding in our house, is inside the house; you know he is a murderer and that he is there to kill your friend. Do you have the right to lie? Kant’s answer is categorically ‘No’, for the maxim of lying does not pass the universality-test.[18] But for what reason does Kant only consider the most simple and unqualified version of the maxim? A more finely-differentiated maxim would yield different results: for example, is it possible to will as a general law, lying to a murderer who shows up to kill an innocent person? In the application of the categorical imperative, Kant indeed dismisses the role of the situation in the process of application; a dismissal which might be questionable even on Kantian grounds. First, it seems morally arbitrary to reduce the maxim to its most unqualified version. Kant is very well aware of the need of judgement in moral reasoning. Moreover, as he explicitly confirms in the Critique of Practical Reason, moral life does not take place within a vacuous sphere of pure noumenality. This would turn us into automatons, gesticulating everything well, but acting as puppets without life in the figures.[19] Moral life implies moral struggle, suggesting at least that there can’t be any principle prohibition of taking the situation into account. Second, the option for the most simple version of a maxim tends to slide again into heteronomy. Kant disregards the situation because he is looking for a moral law which is truly universal, valid for all and for all times. Taking material conditions into account, would only imply a possible threat to the sought-after universality, he believes. But does it really? As we have learned from Badiou (and to a certain extent also from Kierkegaard), ‘situationism’[20] and universalism do not have to exclude each other. Of course, it is not Kant’s conclusion, but it should have been, inherent as it already is in his anti-substantialist idea of subjectivity, and necessitated from the perspective of avoiding heteronomy. Kant insists on the demand that the moral law is given by the subject itself and thus on the impossibility of turning the law into something externally given. I have to give myself the law; as a giving it is a singular happening. Nevertheless, by disregarding all possible material conditions of the giving, he disrobes the act of all singularity, pretending the act is performable within an ideal, abstract space, allowing us to translate the categorical imperative into a set of objective rules as ‘never lie’, ‘never revolt’… as if we could generate a list of duties existing somewhere ‘outside’. In other words: if we fail to singularise the imperative, we risk undoing Kant’s main ethical intuition.

This is however not the same as materialising the categorical imperative[21]. Singularising the imperative does not preclude the distinction between the formal and material dimension; they don’t collapse into one formula. Neither does it devaluate the required universality of the maxim. The application of the first formula remains a strictly formal operation, independent of the particular language-game of the context. As we have seen (according to the legal picture), the prohibition of revolution results from a shift of the direct authority of the imperative to an intermediary logic (the network of duties), towards a stress on our being embedded within a community. The problematic character of the legal picture is itself the result of contextualizing the imperative. Singularisation is nothing less but an opposite movement: taking the situation into account should prevent us from sliding back into the heteronomy of a positive legal system; it subtracts the validity of the imperative of what is considered as valid within the ‘symbolic order’. In other words: every ethical act as ethical remains exceptional, for as an ‘evental’ happening the act is undecidable in terms of the ‘symbolic order’. Would the moral law ever gain an objective status, as being “there” before we act, it would destroy our autonomy.[22] Kant himself realised this, stressing the subjective and unconditioned nature of the ethical act; only as a result of his abstract, non-situational approach of the imperative, he tends to bypass his own insight. But isn’t that why precisely Badiou is so important for Kantianism today: instead of being an incentive for a dismissal, it is Badiou who offers us the opportunity to deepen Kant’s own quintessential insight, reconnecting again the universal with the singular. Might not the time have come for a new alliance?

[1] Dialectic of the Enlightenment, p. 83
[2] Cf. especially Badiou, Ethics
[3] Cf. Badiou, Ethics (ned. 29).
[4] Cf. I. Kant, On the Common Saying: That may be correct in Theory, but it is of no use in practice, in I. Kant (ed.), Practical Philosophy, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1793), 273-309.
[5] I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in I. Kant (ed.), Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1797), 353-603, p. 387.
[6] Cf. I. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998 p. 108.
[7] Cf. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in, p. 384. : “Ethical lawgiving cannot be external, although it does take up duties which rest on another, namely an external, lawgiving by making them, as duties, incentives in its lawgiving.”
[8] For this interpretation, cf. especially R. McCarthy, Moral Conflicts in Kantian Ethics, in History of Philosophy Quarterly 8 (1991) 65-79.
[9] Cf. I. Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, in I. Kant (ed.), Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1795), 317-351, p. 344.: “In order to make practical philosophy consistent with itself, it is necessary first to decide the question, whether in problems of practical reason one must begin from its material principle, the end (as object of choice), or from its formal principle (resting only on freedom in external relations) in accordance with which it is said: So act that your maxim should become a universal law (whatever the end may be). The latter principle must undoubtedly take precedence; for, as a principle of right, it has unconditional necessity, whereas the former necessitates only if the empirical conditions of the proposed end, namely of its being realized, are presupposed.”
[10] Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in, p. 463.
[11] Cf. also P. Nicholson, Kant on the Duty Never to Resist the Sovereign, in Ethics 86 (1976) nr. 3, 214-230, p. 222.
[12] Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, p. 110.: “As soon as something is recognized as a duty, even if it should be a duty imposed through the purely arbitrary will of a human lawgiver, obeying it is equally a divine command. […] the proposition ‘we ought to obey God rather than men’ means only that when humans beings command something that is evil in itself (directly opposed to the ethical law), we may not, and ought not, obey them.”
[13] G. P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution, New York, Russell & Russell, 1966, p. 269.
[14] C. M. Korsgaard, Kant on the Right of Revolution, in A. Reath, B. Herman & C. M. Korsgaard (ed.), Reclaiming the History of Ethics. Essays for John Rawls, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 297-328, p. 319.
[15] Ibid., in, p. 321.
[16] Historically, this seems indeed to be the case. Cf. for example in Zum Ewigen Frieden (AK VIII 346), where he explicitly denies other sovereigns to intervene in French affairs. Cf. also L. W. Beck, Kant and the Right of Revolution, in Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971) nr. 3, 411-422, p. 417.
[17] Cf. also T. E. Hill, Questions about Kant's Oppositio to Revolution, in Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (2002) 283-298, p. 295.
[18] Cf. I. Kant, On a Supposed Right to lie from Philantrophy, in I. Kant (ed.), Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1797), 611-615.
[19] Cf. I Kant, CpR, p. 258.
[20] I use this term to refer to the idea that every truth is the truth of a situation.
[21] Some tend to conflate both, cf. for example R. W. Davis, Is Revolution Morally Revolting?, in The Journal of Value Inquiry 38 (2004) 561-568.
[22] Cf. ook C. Lotz, The Events of Morality and Forgiveness: From Kant to Derrida, in Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006) 255-273, p. 259.; A. Zupančič, Ethics of the Real. Kant, Lacan, London/New York, Verso, 2000, p. 60.

Tony Conrad - Dream Music/ Early Minimalism

2008-03-24T21:38:00.004+01:00

"Repetition itself creates bliss. There are many ethnographic examples: obsessive rhythms, incantatory music, litanies, rites, and Buddhist nembutsu, etc.; to repeat excessively is to enter into loss, into the zero of the signified. But: in order for repetition to be erotic, it must be formal, literal, and in our culture this flaunted (excessive) repetition reverts to eccentricity, thrust toward various marginal regions of music."

Roland Barthes (as quoted by Tony Conrad)

Read Conrad's essay "Preparing for the Propaganda War in the Time of Global Culture: Trance, Form, and Persuasion in the Renovation of Western Music" here

Tony Conrad with Faust - The Pyre of Angus was in Kathmandu (mp3) (reissue on Table of the Elements)

The Grandeur of Reason - conference

2008-03-21T21:33:00.012+01:00

Looks like universalism is back en vogue; a post-9/11 effect? Anyway, the perfect location for this topic and an interesting choice of keynote speakers: Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, David Schindler...

The Grandeur of Reason
Religion, Tradition, Universalism

Rome, 1-4 september 2008

Conference organised by 'The Centre of Theology and Philosophy' of Nottingham University

Conference website

Valet - Naked Acid

2008-02-27T13:14:00.003+01:00

Having recently discovered Honey Owens' first Valet album, this sophomore album (out on Kranky) comes as a pleasant surprise. Even more haunting than one the first, her voice really stands out. The atmosphere reminds me a bit of German krautrock, but in a more American, bluesy kind of way. Definitely one of the best psychedelia-albums of this year. Added you find the song 'Fire', one of the more quiet ones, but also a highlight of the album.

"These songs were Inspired by the Pacific Northwest landscape, semi-conscious dream states and the idea of one's DNA code being accessed as eternal memory."

Valet - Fire (mp3)

Cornell conference

2008-02-17T18:26:00.006+01:00

looking forward to my first conference in the US

The Substance of Thought: Critical and Pre-Critical
keynote speakers: Simon Critchley (The New School for Social Research) and Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, April 10th-12th, 2008
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg/conf2008.html
The last few decades have witnessed a struggle within continental philosophy between those thinkers who accept Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” and those who refuse critical philosophy in favor of a “classical” metaphysics that, in the words of Alain Badiou, “considers the Kantian indictment of metaphysics…as null and void.” This conference will consider the conflict between “critical” and “classical” or metaphysical strains in contemporary thought. Has critical philosophy run its course, as Badiou suggests? Or has Kant’s critical turn determined the horizon of all future philosophical work? Or is there an alternative path?
We are interested in analyzing the contemporary division between thinkers who prescribe a return to the pre-critical metaphysics of, for example, Spinoza, Leibniz, or Lucretius, and those who continue to take up various trajectories of Kant's critical legacy. The former camp might include Deleuze and Badiou as well as Negri and Althusser, while the latter might include Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Derrida. We particularly wish to encourage work that takes a stand on the conflict between the two camps, as well as work that considers the implications of the conflict for the arts and social sciences. The wide range of our inquiry includes interrogations of the nature of critique, the fate of aesthetics, the privilege accorded to immanence or transcendence, and the status of materialism.

Herzog vs Jean Paul

2008-02-13T14:49:00.004+01:00

oh, they can be so dramatic, these Germans!

"I heard only the eternal storm, which no one rules, and the shimmering rainbow, strechted over the abyss and falling into it. And when I looked up to the immeasurable world in search of the divine eye, only an empty eyesocket stared back at me; an eternity lay upon chaos and gnawed at it and chewed upon itself. Cry out, raise a cacophony, scream until the shadow breaks, for He is not! ... Rigid, speechless nothing! Cold, eternal necessity! Insane chance!"
Jean Paul, Siebenkäse (1796)

Werner Herzog on the obscenity of the jungle

2008-02-13T14:48:00.001+01:00

Few filmmakers are so thoroughly modern as Werner Herzog, so thoroughly romantic, but in a disillusioned, anti-romantic kind of way.

"the trees are in misery, the birds are in misery; I don't think they sing, they just schriek in pain […] but there is some sort of harmony; the harmony of overwhelming, collective murder”

Six Organs of Admittance - Eight Cognition / All You've Left

2008-02-12T14:23:00.001+01:00

(K-RAA-K)3 festival - 1 March 2008 Brussel

2008-01-29T13:03:00.000+01:00

MARSHALL ALLEN [us] & PAUL HESSION [uk] BARDO POND [us]
CERAMIC HOBS [uk]
CHERRY BLOSSOMS [us]
DRAGONS OF ZYNTH [us]
RICHARD CRANDELL [us]
ENTRANCE [us]
HELLVETE [b]
TON LEBBINK [nl]
ALEX MACKENZIE [ca]
SEAN MEEHAN [us]
PINK REASON [us]
HENRI POUSSEUR´s "Voix et vues planétaires" [b] PSYCHEDELIC HORSESHIT [us]
R.O.T. [b]
SILVER APPLES [us]
UP-TIGHT [jp]

+ FILMS LAFMS: The Lowest Form of Music NOT THERE HOMMAGE AU SAUVAGE: Henri Pousseur LUC FERRARI DEVANT SA TAUTOLOGIE LABRAT MATINEE + DJ´S after midnight in recyclart + record stands

Official site kraak festival 2008

Josh T. Pearson - Kierkegaard as a Cowboy

2008-01-17T14:13:00.002+01:00

"The time has come that you must decide... to take two steps towards Texas tonight"

Few regions are as polarized as America's South: "either you're in the bar, or you're in church". Josh Pearson has spent quite some time in both. Born in Texas as a son of a preacher, he started to play 'devil-music' in 1996 with his band Lift to Experience, releasing just one album, the magnificent the Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads (an apocalyptic concept album about Texas as the promised land). Unfortunately, he gave his companions 'the boot' shortly after the album-release in 2001. He left Texas for Europe, trying to make a living here (or maybe just living by faith alone) and playing some concerts every now and then. A solo-album has been planned for years. Let's hope he finds the inspiration. Desperate, honest outsider-music; a beacon of hope in our times.

Josh T. Pearson - the Clash (mp3) (lofi live-registration Nantes, France, 2003)

Lift to Experience - With the World Behind (mp3) (live, Peel-session 2001)

Cindy and Bert - DER HUND VON BASKERVILLE

2008-01-15T16:48:00.001+01:00

the good old days of German Schlagermusic

"My blood is clean, but the devil is in me"

2008-01-11T12:21:00.000+01:00

Although we inevitably keep on thinking about music in traditional categories and genre-distinctions, nothing is as fascinating as witnessing young musicians doing away with this, not for the fun of 'everything goes', but because the 'old forms' have lost their urgency; because their creativity asks for a new language. Of course, this is the way 'free jazz' musicians have understood themselves from the sixties on, but even 'free jazz' has become a niche, a respectable institution with its canon, instruments and techniques.

One of these youngs guys deserving our attention here is definitely Chris Corsano. Mostly known for his collaborations with saxofonist Paul Flaherty, he takes 'free jazz' beyond the jazz-idiom, bringing some hardcore-punk energy within a jazz-setting or adding some noise-folk-psych influences together with people as Thurston Moore, Matt Valentine, Jandek... Below you find a song from his album 'The Radiant Mirror' (out on Textile Records), a performance together with Mike Flower, who plays here the shahi baaja (a japanese electric dulcimer/auto-harp).

I also added a song from a great psych album I recently discovered: Blood is clean from Valet (out on Kra nky). Valet is the solo-project of Honey Owens (who has previously played with Jackie-O Motherfucker). Haunting impressionistic guitar-playing with beautiful, etheral vocals.

Flower Corsano duo - Wind (mp3)

Valet - Blood is clean (mp3)

Ben Chasny. An American Mystic

2007-11-30T14:03:00.000+01:00

In some way or another, in our personal life, we are all shaping something like our inner destiny. We are looking for these works of art, for these philosophies, for these people which might help us to refine this essential, singular project. If we are asked though to explain this destiny, we do not find the right words. Of course, we do not give up on reflection. We do not neatly separate life from thought. There is philosophy, as a meaningfull and indispensable figure on this path; but there is no ready-made intellectual framework which fits this destiny. The great joy of music is that (in rare cases) it allows us to catch a glimpse of precisely our own project; that it embodies a vision which is so closely connected to our own destiny, that it strikes us immediately, on a wordless and intuitive basis.

Speaking for myself, Ben Chasny's Six Organs of Admittance hits the right chord there. Independent of his personality, his interests or his lyrics, most of his music embodies a perspective which haunts me in a partly incomprehensible but direct and effective way. Added you find the opening song of his new album 'Shelter from the Ash', out on Drag City. Reading the liner notes, I was very surprised to discover that the song takes its title from a book from Henry Corbin, a French philosopher and scholar of Islamic Mysticism. In his explicitly gnostic readings of the three monotheistic traditions, Corbin is known for affirming their essential unity in strictly dividing the inner religion (the 'inner church') from the different ecclesial masks. As such, together with his pupil Christian Jambet and Michel Henry, Corbin represents the fascinating other side (the esoteric side) of French postmodernism, opposing the superficial playfullness of the exoteric postmoderns with a deeply spiritual vision.

Six Organs of Admittance - Alone with the Alone (mp3)

Postmarxism, also for non-(post)marxists. Kojin Karatani's resetting of the agenda

2007-11-27T15:23:00.000+01:00

"I, too, was part of this vast tendency - called deconstructionism, or the archeology of knowledge, and so on - which I realized later could have critical impact only while Marxism actually ruled the people of many nation-states. In the 1990s, this tendency lost its impact, having become mostly a mere agent of the real deconstructive movement of capitalism.

Skeptical relativism, multiple language games (or public consensus), aesthetic affirmation of the present, empirical historicism, appreciation of subcultures (or cultural studies), and so forth lost their most subversive potencies and hence became the dominant, ruling thought. Today, these have become official doctrine in the most conservative institutions in economically advanced nation-states. All in all, this tendency can be summarized as the appreciation of empiricism (including aestheticism) against rationalism. In this sense, it has become increasingly clear that the return to Kant in recent years has actually been a return to Hume."

K.K., Transcritique. On Kant and Marx, p. xi

Julianna Barwick

2007-11-16T17:40:00.001+01:00

Julianna Barwick is an American solo artists, who has just released her debut album 'Sanguine'. All the 13 short songs are variations on one theme: she loops her own, mostly wordless, vocals and adds some spheric effects to create a circular microcosm. It reminds me a bit of the way Animal Collective makes use of vocal loops, although Julianna's approach is definitely more minimal and introspective.

A live performance at the Portuguese radio station 'Ma Fama', can be found here.

Julianna Barwick - Sanguine (mp3)

"Xenakis, prophet of insensibility" (Milan Kundera)

2007-11-09T13:50:00.000+01:00

In doing some reading about Xenakis, I came across an intruiging essay by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Through a short sketch of some of the basic parameters of western music, he explains the revolutionary character of Xenakis's music. Reading the passage together with the former (on immediate revelation) might help us to understand his work as the musical equivalent of a 'transcendental materialist' position.

"European music is based on the artificial sound of the note and the (tone) scale; it opposes the brutal and objective sonority of the world. As a result of an unbreakable convention European music is obliged from the beginning to express a subjectivity. It seems to fight the sonority of the outside world, like a sensitive being resisting the insensitivity of the universe. European civilization (from the year thousand on) is one of the only civilizations accompanied by a huge and dazzling history of music. This civilization - with its adoration of the suffering of Jezus, its courtly love, its cult of the bourgeois family, its patriotic passions - shaped the sentimental man. Music has played an integral and decisive part in the ongoing process of sentimentalization. But it can happen at a certain moment (in the life of a person or of a civilization) that sentimentality (previously considered as a humanizing force, softening the coldness of reason) becomes unmasked as ‘the supra-structure of a brutality’. This was the moment at which music appeared to me as the ear deafening noise of the emotions, while the sound-world in the works of Xenakis became beauty; beauty purified of the dirt, purified of sentimental barbary. To be a ‘prophet of insensibility’ Joyce could remain novelist; Xenakis had to step out of music. Xenakis opposes the whole of the European history of music. His point of departure is elsewhere; not in an artificial sound isolated from nature in order to express a subjectivity, but in an earthly ‘objective’ sound, in a mass of sound which does not rise from the human heart, but which approaches us from the outside, like raindrops or the voice of wind."

M. Kundera, Prophète de l’Insensibilité, in M. Fleuret (ed.), Regards sur Iannis Xenakis, 1981, Paris. (the translation is mine)

Iannis Xenakis - Concret PH (mp3) (A short piece written for the Phillips-pavillion (cf. picture) at the World Expo 1958. Manipulation of the sound of fire).

Iannis Xenakis

2007-11-06T21:38:00.001+01:00

"Art has something in the nature of an inferential mechanism which constitutes the platforms on which all theories of the mathematical, physical and human sciences move about. Indeed, games of proportion - reducible to number games and metrics in architecture, literature, music, painting, theatre, dance, etc., games of continuity, of proximity, in or outside of time, topological essence - all occur on the terrain of inference, in the strict, logical sense of the word. Situated next to this terrain and operating in reciprocal activity is the experimental mode which challenges or confirms theories created by the sciences, including mathematics. […] It is experimentation that makes or breaks theories, pitilessly and without any particular consideration for the theories themselves. Yet the arts are governed in a manner even richer and more complex by this experimental mode. Certainly there is not nor will there ever be an objective criterion for determining absolute truth or eternal validity even within one work of art, just as no scientific "truth" is ever definitive. But in addition to these two modes - inferential and experimental - art exists in a third mode, one of immediate revelation, which is neither inferential nor experimental. The revelation of beauty occurs immediately, directly, to someone ignorant of art as well as to the connoisseur. This is the strength of art and, so it seems, its superiority over the sciences. Art, while living the two dimensions of inference and experimentation, possesses this third and most mysterious dimension which permits art objects to escape any aesthetic science while still enjoying the caresses of inference and experimentation."

I.X. Art/Science. Alliances

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) is Greek/Romanian composer and architect (he often worked together with Le Corbusier), known for his highly intellectual approach to music. Experimenting with mathematical algorithms, the relation between sound and space, and the manipulation of sound, he became one of the pioneers of electro-acoustic music. Some of his later electronic music is even surpringsly noisy, in a way you wouldn't expect from a modernist composer. Bohor, a work from 1968 is probably the heaviest piece of Avant-garde music I've ever heard (think of Sunn O))) plays John Zorn's Kristallnacht). In contrast also to the work of some of his contemporaries in Avant-garde music, most of his work is very dense, calling to mind the saturated universe of orthodox spirituality (although his language and imagery isn't religious at all).

The Community of Non-Community. Philosophical Anthropology as a Challenge to Theology (Laclau, Badiou, Žižek)

2007-11-06T14:07:00.001+01:00

Introduction

"The unity of all divided humanity is the will of God. For this reason he sent his Son, so that by dying and rising for us he might bestow on us the Spirit of love. […] Division “openly contradicts the will of Christ, provides a stumbling block to the world, and inflicts damage on the most holy cause of proclaiming the Good News to every creature.”[1]

In the first chapter of Ut Unum Sint John Paul II situates the core of the ecumenical enterprise in God’s universal will of salvation. Divided humanity should be re-united into the one Body of Christ and the division between different Churches and ecclesial communities will have to be overcome. One particular church, the Roman-Catholic represents the universal Church of Christ, although elements of truth may be found outside this particular community. But also in the latter case, internally these elements tend towards a reintegration within the Catholic community.

"The Church of Christ "subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him", and at the same time acknowledges that "many elements of sanctification and of truth can be found outside her visible structure. These elements, however, as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, possess an inner dynamism towards Catholic unity”.[2]

As such, with the notion of Catholic Unity the Catholic Church reaffirms again the centrality of the idea of ‘universality’: God’s message is addressed to all men and to reorient the focus to the particularity of truth is thoroughly anti-Catholic. In more recent documents, the Vatican continues to stress this aspect, especially since some deviations within the Catholic community tend to undercut this central and indispensable aspect of Catholic faith. Pope Benedict XVI for example observes that some theologians are more willing to please a community of post-Christians, than to rethink difficult and unfashionable topics as the universality of truth.[1] Having discovered the ‘linguistic turn’ they reduce truth and rationality to what is meaningful within a very particular language game: this allows them to hold on to their so-called tradition while being at the same time a modern pluralist.[2] Tradition then, stripped from its inner grounds and conditions of possibility, becomes a package of identity-features; an outward costume that allows the cultural Christian to know about his identity in the midst of religious plurality. People might have these psychological needs, but as the Vatican and the whole Catholic theological tradition - at least till Johann Baptist Metz - realises, the consequences of this logic are disastrous. Metz even turns the safeguarding of universality into the special mission of the theologian today: “The theologians will be the last universalists in our highly differentiated world of science, and they will have to remain so, whether they like it or not.”[3]
Till so far the Catholic statement: no Christianity without universalism. More precarious is to understand the actual nature of this universalism. How are we to conceive universality and what is its precise relation to particularity? The intuition of my paper consists of the idea that the Catholic tradition defends with good reason the universalist dimension of Christianity, but that there is a risk of a certain misunderstanding of the universality of Christianity. As a result of the latter, the Catholic universalism (as represented by doctrinal documents) might turn out to closely resemble a particularistic position. In other words: the Catholic anti-communitarianism risks to lapse itself into a hidden form of communitarianism. The first part of the paper is meant as a short reconstruction of Catholic universalism. I will undertake this in the light of Ernesto Laclau’s postmarxist philosophy. In a second part, I will take a look at Alain Badiou’s reading of Saint-Paul as an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of a Christian particularism.

I. Ut Unum Sint versus Ernesto Laclau

Coming back to the quotes from Ut Unum Sint, we witness a strict distinction between universality and division. Division contradicts the will of God, for God wants us all to be united. Universality is therefore understood in terms of unity; a unity that can be reached by overcoming the division between different communities, and more specifically through a reintegration of the different extra-Catholic communities within the unity of the Catholic Church. The ultimate source of Christian universality is thus God’s will; a will mediated by one particular community. The mediation itself is not arbitrary. As a result of God’s own incarnation, the body of Christ comes to subsist in the Catholic Church, which as a community governed by the ‘Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him’ can clearly be designated as a particular community. The Catholic Church thus becomes Hegel’s concrete-universal: as the reign of the Spirit, it is the perfect synthesis between the divine and the earthly principle, giving flesh to the universal not just in the singular person of Jesus, but as a reality now accessible to all, through the institutional mediation. The objection to this logic is obvious: the Church may claim it represents the universal, but formally its universality is a generalization of a set of particular truths. Nevertheless, I will refrain here from judging whether the Church claims this with good reasons or not. The function of the objection is to help us to recast the scene and to enter the dialectics of particularity and universality.
Let us then start again, from a more general philosophical perspective, in order to see where the Church might fit in. As Ernesto Laclau[4] remarks, our postmodern condition is characterized by an increased awareness of the particularity of all identity; all discourses are particular discourses and none of them is in itself capable of bringing about the fullness of communion. This results in the common proposition that the validity of any statement is contextually determined. At first sight, the logic of differentiality at work here looks unproblematic: we are living in a culturally pluralistic world, with different identities shaped within different contexts. But, as Laclau points out, a strict logic of differentiality is actually self-defeating and confronts us with a paradox: if all identities are defined within a context and if we are to avoid a complete dispersion of identity, the context will have to be a relatively closed context. But how can we define the limits of a context? If we start from the fact that differences are constitutive for identities, we cannot appeal to something beyond differences. At the same time, we cannot overlook the Hegelian insight that we can only define limits by pointing out what is beyond them. The first solution would thus be to argue that beyond the limits are new differences. But in this case, it becomes impossible to know whether these new differences are internal or external to the context. If there is only contextuality, the very possibility of a limit and thus of a context becomes a problem. Laclau thus argues:

"the only way out of this difficulty is to postulate a beyond which is not one more difference but something which poses a threat (i.e. negates) to all the differences within that context – or, better, that the context constitutes itself as such through the act of exclusion of something alien, of a radical otherness."[5]

By consequence, antagonism is constitutive of all identity: an excluded, non-dialectizable element constitutes the system of differences and allows the context to define its limits.
How does this argument relate to the concept of universality? Laclau directs our attention to the absent focal point where all differences meet, namely ‘the beyond’ as implied by the logic of particularity. In two ways, the logic at work reveals something as universal. Firstly, to make identity-formation possible, ‘the beyond’ has to differ from the logic of differentiality and therefore refuses integretation within a particular discourse. As a result of this distance, it can be labelled as universal. Secondly, because ‘the beyond’ is at the same time a threat to the logic of differentiality, it introduces a universality of equivalence between the different particular discourses: as an ultimate limit it is a threat to all the differential identities, which render them interchangeable concerning the relation to the limit; all identities become equivalent with regard to the void of their outside.[6] The universal is therefore necessarily an elusive, vanishing point, required by the system of differential identities, though at the same time a threat which reproduces a relative universality between the particular identities. It would lead us too far to sketch all the different consequences of such an approach. What concerns us here is the basic structure of Laclau’s analysis as a peculiar tension between the universal as non-dialectizable and the logic of particular discourses; a structure which not only holds for the functioning of discourses, but which has its ontological condition in the subject as “immanently antagonised”[7].
Taking a look again at Ut Unum Sint, Laclau helps us to question an all too easy distinction between universality and division. The risk of such a distinction consists of cancelling the non-dialectizable universality of the beyond in favour of the relative universality between the discourses. The strategy then oscillates between two extremes: either all different discourses come to a full agreement and are united by a newly structured discourse, or one discourse is generalized as the final, all-encompassing discourse. But beside the fact that the Catholic Church tends to opt for the latter strategy, what becomes questionable is not the strategy, but the whole attempt to locate universality at the level of discourse. From the moment, universality is set in opposition with division, a counter-productive logic is set free: universality becomes the end of a process aimed at the erasure of division, and because division is finally understood as a division between different particular discourses, the process of erasure will inevitably turn into a battle of the discourses, all striving for a hegemonic position.
Paradoxically, the opposite thesis might make more sense: true universality is the universality of division. What divides us is finally not our being part of certain community, as distinct from other communities, but our being divided within ourselves. We are split between the sphere of the non-dialectizable and the order of representation. The latter explains how our identity is inevitably a particular construction within a particular community; the first explains why the particular construction does not exhaust who we are and why all construction is always under threat. Does this then leaves us with an opposition between two perspectives on universality, a Christian one which despises division on the one side and a postmodern which embraces division on the other side? Not immediately: the thesis of true universality as the universality of division might be more Christian than one usually thinks. In what follows, I will take a look a the reading of the New Testament by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. As postmarxists, they are not the most orthodox readers of the gospel, but they might help us to get rid of a too communitarian interpretation of Christianity.

II. Saint-Paul and the Foundation of Universalism

In continuity with earlier existentialist interpretations, Badiou and Žižek assist us in detecting a fundamental tension cutting across the whole corpus of the New Testament. The tension is the following: we are split between two lords, and we cannot serve both (Mt 6:24). Obeying the will of the Father is radically incommensurable with obeying Mammon. Of course, this is just one specific formulation, and the different authors of the New Testament each have their terminology to designate the fundamental tension. John focuses on the idea of the world, as a sphere incommensurable with the Life of the Divine: “I am not praying for the world” (Jn 17:9), “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn 18:36). For Paul, the tension is one between Love and the logic of grace on the one side, and the Law and the supplement of sin on the other side. Formalised: we are split, like in Laclau’s scheme, between the non-dialectizable and the economy of representation, for grace cannot be counted, it doesn’t allow any calculation from our side. At different places, the gospel is clear about this radical split which refuses all mediation: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt 16:24). The law, tradition, family… are radically surpassed, unable to mediate between our human condition and the life of faith.
Let us make this a little more specific. As an atheist philosopher, Badiou turns his attention to Paul, not because he believes the traditional claim about Jesus’s resurrection, but because Paul has established a universalist truth-procedure:

"Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of people, a city, an empire, a territory or a social class. What is true cannot be reduced to any objective aggregate."[8]

Badiou stresses that Paul’s notion of ‘Resurrection’ is not meant as an historical claim about the body of Jesus (no wonder that Paul has no interest in the historical Jesus). ‘Resurrection’ functions rather as an empty signifier which designates the pure event of the liberation from the Law. With this notion Paul was able to undermine the existing discourses of his time, by focusing on the site where all the particular discourses lose their representative ground. In contrast with the settled position of the Jews and the Greek, this allows Paul to open up a different relation to reality through his experience of the failure of the existing discourses. More specifically, Paul lays bare how both the Jewish and the Greek discourse are aspects of the same form of mastery. The Jewish discourse is the discourse of the exception, of the prophetic sign and the mastery of its deciphering. The Greek discourse bases itself on the cosmic order and the idea of a direct mastery of the totality through wisdom. The Jew is in exception to the Greek. In both cases their theory of salvation is tied to mastery.

"One may also say: Greek and Jewish discourses are both discourses of the Father. That is why they bind communities in a form of obedience (to the Cosmos, The Empire, God or the Law)."[9]

‘Resurrection’ then designates the reign of the Son, as the event of the opening up of the original closure of truth within particular discourses (of mastery); an event which reconnects us with the impossible Real (the non-dialectizable) as the source of life. As such, Paul makes a strict distinction between the world of truth (which we enter through grace as a pure and simple encounter) and the world of particularity. Of course, Paul knows that we live in a world of particularity, but truth can only be established by traversing all particular differences.[10] As a result, Paul refuses to play the subtle game of identity-construction; since we are all one in Christ, he refuses to set up dividing distinctions: “It is not being circumcised or being uncircumcised that can affect anything – only faith working through love” (Gal 5:6).[11] This is not to deny the idea of a Christian identity. But the identity has now become something paradoxical, as the identity of non-identity, for there are essentially no particular characteristics which shape the identity of being Christian. Moreover, precisely this paradoxical point has become the place from where Christian universality is defined: the universality emerges from the point where those who are ‘part of no-part’ speak. Or as Žižek states:

"Christian universality is formulated from the position of those excluded, of those for whom there is no specific place within the existing order, although they belong to it; universality is strictly codependent with this lack of specific place/determination."[12]

The universal dimension discovered by Paul is therefore not the ‘neither Greek, nor Jew, but all united as Christians’. As Žižek argues, this would exclude the non-Christians and reduce Christianity to a particular discourse with a specific identity. Paul’s insight is that Christian universality is the universality of division. What is universal is the difference itself between Christian (the new man) and non-Christian (the old man). This division cuts across the whole social body: “It proposes something that is open to everybody.[…] The division is internal to the subject itself.”[13]

III. Conclusion

Both Badiou and Žižek agree that true evil does not lie in an excess of subjectivity, but in its ‘ontologization’, in its reinscription into a positive order of Being (cf. the Greek discourse of mastery). At once, this is for both the great insight of Christianity, that “the global cosmic ‘chain of Being’ is not ‘all there is’, that there is another Order which suddenly emerges and which suspends the validity of the Order of Being”[14]. Love, as non-negotiable, as non-dialectizable, as grace cuts through our being emerged in a particular subset of Being. As such, this kind of Urspaltung (a primal cut) is what connects us all; it opens up a true universality, which is no longer the generalization of a particular discourse. Also ecumenism might be driven by an attempt to avoid the model of generalization. But as an ecclesial practice, it becomes highly questionable if it will ever be able to escape the pitfalls of communitarianism. Theology in general tends to get stuck in a logic of differentiality. In a ever more secular world, it suffers from a strong need to affirm its own particular identity. These needs are human, without doubt, but the consequences of this logic might be disastrous: here, Christianity tends to degrade itself to a particular life-option, to a subset/dogmatism/fundamentalism among others, suppressing the universality of division in favour of the comfort of its own niche.

"There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ" (Rom 3:22-24)

[1] Cf. for example in Dominus Jesus, § 4: “The roots of these problems are to be found in certain presuppositions of both a philosophical and theological nature, which hinder the understanding and acceptance of the revealed truth. Some of these can be mentioned: the conviction of the elusiveness and inexpressibility of divine truth, even by Christian revelation; relativistic attitudes toward truth itself, according to which what is true for some would not be true for others.” Cf. also the recent notification on Roger Haight’s Jesus Symbol of God: “This theological position fundamentally denies the universal salvific mission of Jesus Christ (cf. Acts 4:12; 1 Tim 2:4-6; Jn 14:6) and, as a consequence, the mission of the Church to announce and communicate the gift of Christ the Saviour to all humanity (cf. Mt 28:19; Mk 16:15; Eph 3:8-11), both of which are given clear witness in the New Testament and have always been proclaimed as the faith of the Church, even in recent documents.”
[2] For an Anglican perspective, cf. especially the thought of John Milbank. Having flirted with a rather particularistic Yale-school approach (in Theology and Social Theory), he more and more comes to stress the universalist aspects of Christianity. “Once again theologians have been caught out in their inauthentic pusillanimity. In deference to liberal fashion, they have foresworn Christian claims to uniqueness, to a transcending of the Jewish legacy and so forth. Now they are wrong-footed by Marxist atheists who recall us to the facts of historical phenomenology: Christianity was the first Enlightenment, the first irruption of an absolutely universal claim.” J. Milbank, Materialism and Transcendence, in C. Davis, J. Milbank & S. Žižek (ed.), Theology and the Political. The New Debate, Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2005, 393-426, p. 35.
[3] “Die Theologen werden die letzten Universalisten in unserer hochdifferenzierten Wissenschaftswelt sein, und sie werden es – um Gottes und der Menschen willen – bleiben müssen, gelegen oder ungelegen, immer auch mit der Bereitschaft, einen gewissen Ungleichzeitigkeitsverdacht auf sich sitzen zu lassen. […] Der Theologe, der nicht sich selbst und andere betrügen will, der Theo-logie treibt, und zwar nicht als dies oder das, sondern als den immer neuen Versuch der Rede von Gott, ist und bleibt auf Universalität verpflichtet.” J.B. Metz, Zum Begriff der neuen Politischen Theologie: 1967-1997, Mainz: , 1997, 156.
[4] E. Laclau, Subjects of Politics, Politics of the Subject, in Differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7 (1995) nr. 1, 146-164, p. 150-153.
[5] Ibid., in, p. 151.
[6] Cf. also S. Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2006, p. 36.
[7] Laclau agrees here with Žižek that we finally will have to make this move and that we cannot treat the distinction as one between two externally opposed views. Cf. E. Laclau, Politics, Polemics and Academics: An Interview by Paul Bowman, in Parallax 5 (1999) nr. 2, 96-107, p. 100. For the reason why we have to interiorize this, cf. Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 36.
[8] A. Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, trans. by R. Brassier, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 5.
[9] Ibid., p. 42.
[10] This does not mean however, that Paul is trying to abolish particular differences. His strategy is more subtle. Take for example his relation to what is Jewish. As Rom 9:1-6 makes clear, Paul’s relation to the Jews is essentially positive. It is therefore not all Paul’s aim to discredit particularity. But he finally praises particularity only to be able to traverse it. In Badiou’s words: “Paul fights against all those who would submit postevental universality to Jewish particularity. […] The task Paul sets for himself is obviously not that of abolishing Jewish particularity, which he constantly acknowledges as the event’s principle of historicity, but that of animating it internally by everything of which it is capable relative to the new discourse, and hence the new subject.”[10] Moreover, Paul does not conceal his own strategy here: “To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law – though not being myself under the law – that I might win those under the law. […] I have become all things to all men” (Cor. I.9:19-22). Ibid., p. 102.
[11] Cf. also Paul’s disdain for customary casuistry: within the order of particularity everything is essentially admitted. “In truth, all things are clean” (Rom 14:20). Also on the level of intersubjectivity, Paul displays a similar generosity: “Why, then, does one of you make himself judge over his brother, and why does another among you despise his brother? […] Let us each stop passing judgement, therefore, on one another” (Rom 14:10-13). To protect the universalism, he even explicitly warns that one must avoid doctrinal quarrels as much as possible. “Give a welcome to anyone whose faith is not strong, but do not get into arguments about doubtful points” (Rom 14:1)
[12] Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 35.
[13] A. Badiou, An Interview with Alain Badiou. “Universal Truths and the Question of Religion”, in Journal of Philosopy and Scripture 3/1 (2005) 38-42, p. 40.
[14] S. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 133.

Charalambides

2007-09-29T14:58:00.000+02:00

Charalambides - The Good Life (mp3) (from their forthcoming album Likeness, on Kranky)

Michel Henry and the Origin of Evil

2007-09-24T18:31:00.000+02:00

Liberating spiritual life from the constraints of religious identity-politics, from neuroscientific reductionism and politically correct pluralism, Michel Henry is definitely one of the most fascinating phenomenologists of the last decennia. As a severe critic of the whole linguistic turn, Henry might even count today as the last genuine transcendental philosopher. But the more I read and think about his project, the more I'm puzzled about one specific question: How does Henry explain the origin of evil?

Throughout his critique of traditional phenomenology’s failure to address the question of what phenomenological appearing actually means, Henry is led to discover auto-affection as the origin of the phenomenological process; an origin he identifies with Life, and which he sets in opposition with the world. Life as self-revelation thus remains independent of all forms of worldly intentionality, and cannot be approached from the perspective of the world. At the same time Henry discovers (through his reading of the gospel of John) that precisely the Christian God is the One who is necessarily self-revealing. God’s form of manifestation has nothing to do with what becomes manifest in the world; it precedes worldly intentionality as the basis condition for all phenomenality. Henry therefore equates the Absolute with Life and with God, understood as the Christian God (Absolute=Life=God=the Christian God); a God who can never be found through a modification of our worldly knowing, but only through our own self-affective life as opposed to our worldly ‘nature’. The latter explains Henry’s enraging critique on all kinds of hermeneutics. Because the truth of Life is independent of worldly particularities, hermeneutics is a life-denying enterprise in which our divine nature becomes reduced to a set of arbitrary worldly features. The same goes for biblical exegesis or historical approaches of the truth of Christianity, for as he stresses: “it is truth and truth alone that can offer us access to itself”. Language is an instrument of worldly intentionality and therefore the negation of reality. But because we are revealed to be son of God, we are not destined to dwell in the untruth of language: through the self-affectivity of our life we share in the Life of God.

Henry's phenomenological/theological critique on the diverse forms of worldly reductionism is at the same time a strong cultural critique. An intriguing example is the last and apocalyptic chapter of 'I am the Truth'. Henry's observation of the modern world as haunted by a technology foreign to life, makes him proclaim that we have entered the era of the Anti-Christ. Or as he says: “Upon the Anti-Christ Allegation (even when this Allegation is completely ignored these days) is founded the organization of the whole modern world. […] A new era begins, a dangerous time, not just of episodic lying but of systematic, permanent, efficient and ontological lying that can no longer be perceived as such.” But how is this possible? Where does this fall come from? If we are son of God, if we share in the divine Life of God, and if God is the One and thus the Absolute outside of which nothing exists, how is it possible that we live in exile and that the laws of the world have the power to make us forget about our divine nature?

Phenomenologically Henry explains the logic of the world as a transcendental illusion; because Life is One, our being caught in the worldly is a form of transcendental forgetfulness. But this doesn’t explain how this illusion comes to reign over life in the modern world. Unfortunately, Henry remains rather silent about this, and takes recourse to metaphors as ‘the Anti-Christ’ and the ‘Statue of the Beast’ without adequatly explaining their phenomenological origin. This raises the suspicion that Henry opts for a rather traditional Augustinian solution, in such a way even that he gives up on his purely immanent phenomenological theology in which there is no room for a contingency like the fall which would cause original sin. At the same time however, Henry sees himself unable to adopt a more Plotinian solution like that of Schelling, by displacing the origin of evil into divine life itself. This would imply the end of Life as undifferentiated and immediate self-affection, and as a Christian Henry indeed refuses to ontologize evil.

My intuition so far is that Henry's Christianising of phenomenology contaminates the rigor of his phenomenological project. I fail to see how he explains the power of forgetfullness and why the Plotinian solution would be phenomenologically intolerable. Furthermore, I do not see why he does not succumb to the same contamination of universality as he detects all over by equating the 'Absolute' with the 'Christian Absolute'. Of course, Henry defends the view that there is no risk here of particularising phenomenology. The truth of Christ is the universal truth, and therefore completely independent of worldly assertions of a particular religion. But this is quite unconvincing: in order to claim that life as absolute self-affection leads us to the recognition of Christ and the Father he shows himself dependent on a particular reading of the Johannine texts. Moreover, from his perspective of purely immanent phenomenology the whole idea of particular associations are unnecessary. If God is Life, indifferent to all possible forms of worldly mediation, there is no need to associate Life with a very particular tradition.

[1]Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, 270-272.

Om - Pilgrimage

2007-09-15T15:48:00.000+02:00

"Through music, and all art for that matter, a glimpse of something ineffably sacred can occur. It can't be tapped consciously, it visits and envelops when it chooses. In that, there is a flash of something outside of time and space. Art of that nature can be a catalyst to a dilation of one's perception of the universe." (Al Cisneros)

In anticipation of Om's new album Pilgrimage, Southern Lord has just posted one of the songs as a mp3. Om is Chris Hakius and Al Cisneros, the rhythm-section of former doom legends Sleep (while Matt Pike went on to form High on Fire). Continuing the sound of Sleep, but purified and more minimal, they take heavy music in a more spiritual direction. With their trance-inducing rhythms and chant-like vocals, they're indeed your ultimate gnostic doom band.

Om - Unitive Knowledge of the Godhead (mp3)

Keiji Haino

2007-09-07T11:20:00.001+02:00

For those who like their jazz wild and distorted, I just found out about a great collaboration. Purple Trap, was an occasional super-band, in which we find the number 1 of the Japanese avant-garde Keiji Haino backed by the great rhythm-section of Rashied Ali (drummer with the late John Coltrane) and Bill Laswell. Do not expect many structure here. Whereas Ali shows himself as the leading exponent of multidirectional rhythms/polytonal percussion, Haino screams and tortures his guitar, building up crescendo's without givening the listener much to rest on.

I also added a song from the first double-live Fushitsusha album. Fushitsusha was Haino's psychedelic freak-out band. Indepted to the European and American psychedelic rock of the late sixties and early seventies, Haino manages to develop a whole new aesthetics: guitarplaying becomes wrestling and every performance becomes a singular happening. Haino refuses to play songs over and over again, and indepted to the spirit of free jazz, he's one of the first and only artists who succesfully integrates the freedom of jazz into the domain of rock.

A good interview with Haino can be read here.

Purple Trap - Just now let us continue to say farewell (mp3) (from the album "Decided... Already The Motionless Heart Of Tranquility, Tangling The Prayer Called "I", on John Zorn's Tzadik label)

Fushitsusha - #2 (mp3) (from Double Live, PSF 4)

2007-06-27T14:36:00.000+02:00

As I am soon leaving for India, there will be no updates for the next month.

Added you find a raga by the well know master Ali Akbar Khan, as well two musical registrations of Tibetan rituals. The latter are released on a compilation called "Tibetan Buddhist Rites from the Monastery of Bhutan", and are among the best field recordings of Tibetan Music. Listening to it, I'm again suprised how rich their musical heritage is. In the West we just have begun to discover Eastern music; a discovery which I believe somehow might have the power to reconceive traditional Western conceptions of music as well as our appraisal of the spiritual traditions of the East.

Ali Akbar Khan - Two Lovers (mp3)

Tibetan Rites - Exhortation to the Guardian Goddess of Long Life (mp3)

Tibetan Rites - Rise Up, Padma Sambhava (mp3)

The Violence of the Real. Transcendental Style in Film

2007-06-18T20:17:00.000+02:00

Since I saw Taxi Driver for the first time (about 7 or 8 years ago), it has always remained one of my favourite movies. And thinking about transcendental types, I used to associate precisely Travis (Robert De Niro) with such a type. Travis, an old war-veteran who suffers of insomnia, is the typical loner who cannot finds it place again in the 'symbolic order'. He tries to be a taxi driver, as an attempt to symbolise his position at the margin, but also this fails. Being himself an outcast, living with outcasts (while working at night, serving other people in the margin) is not an option. What has fallen apart is the 'symbolic order' as a whole. We could say: a theology of liberation is no longer an option, for the idea of moral or political reform (as a program) has lost it's force. But where the symbolic loses its grip over Travis, Travis becomes the hostage of a different force: a singular, absolute relation to the real (he has to kill). Of course, this absolute relation manifest itself first in the form of a program: he prepares an attack on the presidential candidate, but it becomes clear that his agenda is finally not political. He has to be remain faithfull to a singular calling, and this can be lived anywhere and anytime.

Of course, I used to consider this Lacanian-transcendental reading as a little bit of overinterpretation, but was surprised to discover recently that Paul Schrader (the scriptwriter of Taxi Driver) had actually such a sort of transcendental type in mind. Schrader took his inspiration from Bresson's movie Pickpocket, and had just finished his studie of the work of Bresson, Ozu and Geyer, published as 'Transcendental Style in Film'. In a next topic, I will come back on his idea of transcendental style, for it are precisely these experiments which will help us to conceive something like a transcendental style in music (in life, in thought).

Jarboe / Swans

2007-06-12T02:15:00.000+02:00

"a ritual awakening
transport transformation
in her altar of temptation
taste of bliss, anunciation

treasure book and temple
eternal idol mystica
transcendental satisfaction
the sweet meat - love and holy cult"

I have no idea what Jarboe is actually trying to say here; it's just always a little funny to hear the word 'transcendental' in a song (definitely not a word with good pop-credibility). Anyway, Jarboe is still, after so many years one of the most fascinating women in rock music. The song 'ode to v' is from her 1995 album Sacrificial Cake.

Added are also two Swans songs. Jarboe became part of the Swans in 1986 and married frontman Michael Gira. For 10 years as a creative duo, they made some of the most intense music, anticipating many developments in rock (in the early eighties they started the whole noise/industrial movement, in the early nineties postrock). The end of the band was also the end of their marriage. The both still continue as solo-artists. Michael Gira also performs with his band Angels of Light, and owns his own underground record label 'Young God records' (he discovered for example Devendra Banhart).

Jarboe - Ode to V (mp3)

Swans - Failure (mp3) (from the 1991 album White Light from the Mouth of Infinity)

Swans - 1000 years (mp3) (from the 1988 Lp World of Skin)

One divides into Two. On Immanent Tensions

2007-06-01T20:49:00.000+02:00

On thinking further about ‘Battles’ and the philosophy of Deleuze, I realised how relative a notion as immanence can be. In some way, indeed through their aspired neutrality, ‘Battles’ invoke a pure immanent logic: the music is not about something, it’s not representational, there is no external reference. But this idea of immanence has nothing to do with the immanence of a flat, liberal cultural, nothing with a pragmatic acceptance of the contemporary world. Through the whole logic of deterritorialisation, true music opens up within immanence a way of connecting with what we could call the ‘Real’, or in the Deleuze’s terminology ‘Life’. Deleuze stresses here that this connection with Being as Life is in itself a pure immanent happening, in this sense that he wants to exclude all reference to a transcendent metaphysical principle like a theistic God. Nevertheless, Deleuze also establishes a structure of absolute non-relation, of discontinuity through deterritorialisation. In this sense he repeats a move which we could associate with a contemporary form of transcendentalist dualism. Of course, metaphysically Deleuze argues that Being is One, but this one immediately divides into two: the process of absolute creativity (of Life) gives rise to actual states of being, and as such there appears a distinction between a dynamic principle of creation and the static orders of creatures. The latter then becomes our ‘home’, as the world of representation, and as a flight from ‘Life’, whereas true spirituality instead implies the radical affirmation of ‘Life’ by becoming a vessel of creation: so we have to go back from the static order of creatures/objects to the transcendental, dynamic order of creation. Surprisingly, Deleuze comes here very close to the thought of Michel Henry, to the ‘nouveaux philosophes’ (Jambet & Lardreau) and to more Lacanian inspired authors as Kristeva.

For a bright analysis of the non-relational, dualistic tendencies of contemporary French thought, cf. Peter Hallward, The One or the Other. French Philosophy Today, in Angelaki (2003/2) 1-31. Cf. also his book on Deleuze: Out of this World. Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, Verso, 2006.

Battles. Exercises in Deleuzian Deterritorialisation?

2007-05-24T12:02:00.001+02:00

Visually, I use to associate Deleuze’s thought with avant-garde architecture woven into the busyness of contemporary metropoles, with the rhizomatic arms of the London-subway or with the chaotic though clean structures of a city like Tokyo. Deleuze’s philosophy also seems to be a philosophy for the inhabitants of these hypertech cities, for those having lost their affinity with a life centered around the church-tower. ‘Battles’ then might provide them with a soundtrack. The more I listen to their recent album ‘Mirrored’, the more I’m inclined to consider it as a musical equivalent of at least some key elements of Deleuzian thought. The core concept here is ‘immanence’. In their aspired neutrality, Battles tries to present a pure immanent musical vision: the music doesn’t serve to express emotions, political agenda’s or intellectual thoughts; its aim is not to comfort us with recognizable patterns which allow us a homecoming in the song, nor just to distract us. But it is also not the case that thoughts, emotions or politics do not matter. What makes their music immanent is that there are not trying to open up the musical language through direct references to an outside. If they express any of these (emotions, thoughts...), it’s aimed to happen only through a pure musical play of differences, through shifting rhythmical patterns and references which remain within their own self constructed musical language (they have for example invented their own system of annotation by way of diagrams). The cover of their album perfectly symbolizes this: locked up in a monad, they generate difference from within. And ‘Mirrored’ is not the outside; only the inside is. Nevertheless, precisely the generation of difference from within should enable true connection. In some way, this is comparable to what Deleuze calls ‘disjunctive synthesis’: all monads express the One, and this guarantees that all monads are connected, although there is no direct connection between them: everything is locked up within the inside of monad.

“The first musical operation is to machine the voice” (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 303).

Contemporary Electronic Music: Fennesz, Ben Frost

2007-05-21T17:32:00.000+02:00

Of course, electronic music is not only music to dance to. From Brian Eno to Aphex Twin or Biosphere there has always been for example a wide range of ambient electronics. Many have explored how to manipulate sounds, how to work without rythm or melody and so how to create intriguing soundscapes. Too often however, ambient music risks to function as wallpaper-music, fit to be played in expensive hotel-lounges. Luckily, more and more artists are taking ambient in new directions, transgressing the traditional boundaries between electronic and rock music. Christian Fennesz might be a nice example. He combines rock-elements with electronic noise and other effects, often by using some guitarchords which he manipulates later on, in order to bury popmelodies underneath a dense layer of electronics. Ben Frost could be considered a pupil of him. On his recent debut album 'Theory of Machines' he manages to find a fine equilibrium between both genres (not hiding his influences: Michael Gira was the frontman of noise-rock band 'Swans').

Ben Frost - We Love you Michael Gira (mp3) (from 'Theory of Machines', out on Bedroom Community)
Fennesz - The Point of it All (mp3) (from his 2004 album 'Venice', out on Touch records)

Epistemological Explorations II. MacIntyre on Tradition-Dependent Rationality

2007-05-14T20:39:00.000+02:00

The whole idea that the linguistic turn is inevitable, that rationality has to be conceived as narratively framed, that there is no way to escape language… has taken today the form of a new ideology: the ideology of hermeneutic particularism. In different ways I would like to counter this ideology by investigating the aporias of this positions, as well as by exploring a different conception of rationality and subjectivity.

I’ve already taken a short look at Taylor’s conception of Modernity, but I will delve now a little deeper into the epistemology of Alasdair MacIntyre; an epistemology which I consider to be one of the strongest feeding the ideology of hermeneutic particularism, particularly for elaborating the idea of a tradition-dependent rationality. MacIntyre became known to the philosophical audience by publishing his highly acclaimed After Virtue[1]. In this book he opposes the modern, liberal project of a universalising ethical account, in order to return to a kind of virtue ethics as was known in Greek Antiquity. Precisely in its denial of the role of particularity and tradition, modern ethics is considered abstract and empty, and thus unable to provide us with a substantial vision of our goal in life. His epistemology, to which I limit myself here, can mainly be found in the sequel to After Virtue, namely Whose Justice? Which Rationality?[2]. This book can be read as a plea to always understanding philosophy “in terms of the historical context of tradition, social order and conflict out of which it emerged.”[3] Crucial is the idea of an ever-evolving historical story, constituting a tradition, and as such providing the framework for rationality.[4] In other words: conceptions of rationality always have their own story.

MacIntyre conceives the development of a tradition as an evolution through different stages. He distinguishes three. Every rationality starts in a condition of pure, historical contingency. The beliefs, the practices, the institutions and eventually the founding texts of a particular community constitute a given, which gives rise to a certain rationality, a certain way to understand the world. In this first stage, the authorative texts and voices have not yet been questioned. However, after a while, incoherencies appear and some lacunae in the particular system of convictions become visible. This marks the transition to a second stage. Normally, this transition takes place when a community is confronted with new situations it cannot adequately deal with by using its original system of beliefs. Therefore inadequacies become identified in this stage, but not yet remedied. This happens in the third stage by developing reformulations and re-evaluations, which should be able to overcome the limitations and inadequacies of the former system. This is the stage of inventivity. Important however is that this inventivity is never to be considered as a free or unbound inventivity: some ruptures may occur, but “some core of shared belief, constitutive of allegiance to the tradition, has to survive every rupture.”[5]
So far, it would be possible to reproach MacIntyre relativism. Because of the radical particularity-dependency we get the impression that he holds on to a pure coherency-theory of truth, and that there are in the end so many truths as there are traditions of rationality. MacIntyre however wants to tackle this impression by an account of interaction between different rationalities. According to him, the incommensurability and the untranslatibility of traditions does not exclude that a certain form of dialectics between the traditions can be thought of. MacIntyre points out the fact that a tradition is normally able to respond and to react to new situations by using its own resources and that within the account given above, there is no real interaction with other forms of rationality. It is possible however that a tradition reaches the point that it is no longer able to evolve by using its own standards. A situation may occur where a tradition exposes more inadequacies and previously unknown incoherencies in using its own methods of research. MacIntyre calls this an epistemological crisis: the tradition reaches a point where its own survival is at stake. Of course, the occurrence of such a crisis does not have to be fatal. It means that a tradition is falsifiable. It can be put into question as a whole. It is clear that there are two options in case of a crisis: either the tradition actually gets falsified, or it still manages to come up with a solution. A solution demands the invention of new concepts and frameworks, or theories that meet three specific requirements.[6] Firstly, the conceptually enriched schemes must provide a solution to the problems, which gave rise to the crisis. Secondly, it must provide an explanation of what is was that rendered the tradition sterile or incoherent. Thirdly, these first two tasks must be carried out in such a way that shows some fundamental continuity between the new schemes and the original tradition. If these three things are not compatible a conversion to a rival tradition becomes inevitable. Consequently a conversion is not arbitrary, but motivated by the failure of the own tradition. That specific tradition, which is able to answer the unsolved questions of the original tradition, therefore becomes attractive.

MacIntyre thus believes that the idea of falsification is tenable without returning to the idea of a reality independent of a particular, tradition-bound rationality.[7] The principle of falsification is grafted onto the possibility of uncovering the inadequacies of a tradition, always measured by its own standards. But because of the fact that other traditions sometimes may give better answers to problems of the own tradition, the closeness of a tradition is forced open and gives rise to a kind of dialectics and interaction. MacIntyre himself even speaks of the possibility of “a rational debate between and a rational choice among rival traditions.”[8] The opportunity of a challenge by other traditions rests on the possibility of the apprehension of a ‘second first language’ and on the skill of ‘empathetic imagination’[9]. The language of a tradition may be untranslatable, but this does not preclude the possibility of apprehending another language; apprehension as the condition to judge what exactly remains untranslatable.

It is clear that MacIntyre here offers for example theology a very interesting epistemology. Firstly, he demonstrates the constitutive role of authority and tradition for rationality. Furthermore, it is clear that the element of faith inevitably re-enters: holding on to a specific rationality always implies an element of faith, exactly because all rationality retains an element of contingency. Critical reasoning is in other words always already a ‘fidens quarens intellectum’[10]. Secondly, MacIntyre is convinced that his epistemology does not lead to relativism. The relationship between rationality and a particular tradition does not imply a need to abandon all notions of objectivity. It does not imply that in the end an infinite number of rationality-traditions exist next to one another in total incommensurability. Between the traditions there will always be a kind of dialectics, which makes a certain rapprochement between the ‘truths’ possible. However, exactly at this point, MacIntyre’s project becomes questionable. Crucial is the question of the statute of MacIntyre’s interaction-scheme. Is the scheme in itself a merely tradition-bound, particular scheme, or does this scheme, at least concerning the validity of it, transcend the different particular traditions? In his answer to the problem of perspectivism and relativism, he conveys the impression that this is happening. The problem with this however consists of the risk of contradicting the own point of departure. On the other hand, when he presents his scheme as merely particular, it becomes hard to see how he finally does not fall back to relativism.

MacIntyre thus presents us a general model, which explains how a form of dialectics between traditions can be thought of: on the basis of an ‘empathetic imagination’ a person learns ‘a second first language’, and so he goes on to investigate the relation between the newly acquainted tradition and the problems that gave rise to the epistemological crisis of the own tradition. MacIntyre presents both the skill of ‘empathetic imagination’, the possibility of learning ‘a second first language’, as well as the structure of the development of a tradition, namely the possibility of an epistemological crisis together with the step-by-step plan for the solution, as somewhat tradition-transcendent. That is at least the impression we get. Sometimes, he is even quite explicit.

“The grounds for an answer to relativism and perspectivism are to be found, not in any theory of rationality as yet explicitly articulated and advanced within one or more of the traditions with which we have been concerned, but rather with a theory embodied in and presupposed by their practices of inquiry.”[11]

The principles that should allow interaction and a form of dialectics between the (enquiry-bearing) traditions cannot be reduced to a specific tradition. According to this quote, they enable precisely a ‘dialogue’ between the traditions, and so seem to be presupposed by the different traditions. This sounds quite logical: to resolve a conflict between rival traditions on a legitimate basis, one cannot use principles that are restricted to just one of the traditions. MacIntyre’s problem however consists then of the fact that he falls back on a transcendental logic by speaking of “a theory embodied in and presupposed by”. Of course, he could claim that he only proposes a minimal, formal procedure as general, and not articulated substantive standards. But that would not solve the problem. On the contrary: a transcendental logic precisely rests on such a formal procedure. What’s more, it would just be highly ironic to slide back into a formal, procedural logic, exactly because this typifies the modern, liberal tradition he is in fact opposing.[12]

Nevertheless, an alternative reading seems possible. The system of interaction could be considered as universal on merely pragmatic grounds, more precisely because it would be for all traditions the most profitable scheme within the light of their own further development. He himself states quite clearly, that each system only has to gain by the idea that another system may be superior on some topic.

“The only rational way for the adherents of any tradition to approach intellectually, culturally, and linguistically alien rivals is one that allows for the possibility that in one or more areas the other may be rationally superior to it. […] Only those whose tradition allows for the possibility of its hegemony being put in question can have a rational warrant for asserting such a hegemony.”[13]

Progression then has to be evaluated from the possibilities to explain more in the future; as a possibility that becomes optimised by accepting MacIntyre’s interaction-scheme on a pragmatic basis. This would not have to result in relativism, because in the course of time a form of dialectics remains upright: one system will lose out on another, simply because e.g. system A will be able to explain more than system B. Thus to be able to explain more or less then becomes the criterion which allows for a legitimate comparison between different rationalities. Still, it can be doubted that MacIntyre here succeeds in escaping relativism. The ‘more or less’, according to MacIntyre’s own logic, can no longer be considered as a neutral criterion: there is no ‘more or less’ as such. Therefore he will have to admit that the ‘more or less’ is also tradition-bound and so already an internal principle. He will have to admit that with this criterion, it is impossible to install a genuine form of dialectics. The adherents of system A may be convinced that their system is able to explain more than system B, while the adherents of system B may be convinced that it can explain more than system A. When rationality as such is thought of as tradition-bound, one has to admit that all inadequacies as well as all solutions have to be thought of intra-systemically as well. Thus if an epistemological crisis can only be called so from within the rationality of one’s own tradition, nothing states that crises will keep occurring. Finally, it cannot be excluded that some traditions of rationality are able to reach such a high degree of coherence so that a number of traditions will exist next to on another, incommensurable and without interaction.[14]

Endnotes
[1] A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London, 1981.
[2] A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame, 1988.
[3] Ibid., 390.
[4] This implies that all rationality has to be understood from within a specific tradition of understanding or research. MacIntyre himself uses the word of ‘enquiry-bearing traditions’. Cf. Id. 354. This idea is closely related to Imre Lakatos’ model of ‘scientific research programs’. What Lakatos proposes within the context of natural sciences, seems so to get translated by MacIntyre for a context of human sciences. On this affinity, cf. also A.N. Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity. Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion and Ethics, 49-62.
[5] A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 356.
[6] Cf. A. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 362.
[7] Cf. Ibid., 357: “Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention”
[8] Ibid, 352.
[9] [9] Jennifer A. Herdt turns attention to the ironical fact that this is precisely a liberal concept, and that by consequence MacIntyre does not manage to stay within his own tradition. Cf. J.A. Herdt, Alasdair MacIntyre’s “Rationality of Traditions” and Tradition-Transcendental Standards of Justification, in The Journal of Religion 78 (1998) 524-546; 531-532.
[10] Cf. also, C. Early, MacIntyre, Narrative Rationality and Faith, in New Blackfriars 82 (2001) 35-43.
[11] A. MacIntyre, o.c, 354.
[12] Cf. also J.A. Herdt, Alasdair MacIntyre’s “Rationality of Traditions” and Tradition-Transcendental Standards of Justification, in The Journal of Religion 78 (1998) 535: “Is MacIntyre’s rationality of traditions perhaps just a new Enlightment method?”
[13] A. MacIntyre, o.c, 388.
[14] Nowadays, it is still possible to present oneself as a die-hard materialist, or as a die-hard idealist, even as a neo-platonist or as a neo-scholastic.

Lichens - Drone Improvisation

2007-05-14T14:10:00.000+02:00

Lichens is the solo project of Robert Lowe (90 day men, TV on the Radio); his vehicle to explore, on a mostly improvisational basis, a variety of introspective soundscapes, combined with melodic guitar lines (which remind me again of John Fahey). Limiting himself to guitar (acoustic or electric), some effects, minimal percussion and wordless vocals, he creates densely layered, dreamy songs, without losing himself within a pool of homogenous sounds. The subtle use of atomic guitar chords here even reinforces the haunting effect of the drone: the structure he waves into the songs is circular and hypnotic, taking the listener further on the path of what some would call an other-worldly vision.

On his recently released album 'Omns' he continues the aesthetic perspective of his debut 'The Psychic Nature of Being', though with a little more use of effects as overdubbing (the tracks on his debut are all one time improvisations). Added you will find a song from both albums; 'Shore Line Scoring' from his debut, and 'Vevor of Agassou' from 'Omns'. Both albums are released on Kranky.

Lichens - Shore Line Scoring (mp3)

Lichens - Vevor of Agassou (mp3)

Noise. The Rumbling of Being

2007-05-10T15:23:00.000+02:00

At least from Schönberg on, there has always been a certain fascination for atonality in music (in the sixties further explored in the field of free jazz, and from the late seventies on in electronic and rock music by bands as Throbbing Gristle). Noise-music explicitly injects this fascination into a blend of diverse musical styles, essentially as an attempt to do away with the traditional boundaries of musical sense. It aspires to create time and time again a new, free language of musical expression. Of course, it’s rather contradictory to turn it into a new genre. But this has never been an attempt. The generally conservative attitude of 90% of all musicians has created the impression of a separate niche. The musical focus is often on dissonance, subtle tensions and violent outbursts, but also this cannot be made into a rule. What typifies noise-artists is their willingness to embrace new idioms and techniques which defy classical distinctions. The music itself can vary from cerebral to wildly chaotic, from hypnotic to aggressive.

Added you find a rare collaboration between Anthony Braxton and Wolf Eyes. Wolf Eyes are today one of the most popular noise bands (popular here doesn’t mean accessible). Their roots are in the hardcore-industrial rock, but they soon started to deconstruct the traditional rock approach, using self-made instruments, tape-manipulations and effect-pedals (often for other purposes then the traditional guitar-distortion). Anthony Braxton is a legendary figure in the world of avant-garde and free jazz. He has been called ‘the last bona fide genius of jazz music’, especially because of his attempt to combine a more traditional jazz approach with the practices and composing techniques of non-jazz artists as John Cage and Stockhausen. Being often reproached of not being a truly jazz-musician and for being too cerebral and abstract, Braxton actually proves to be a truly open-minded artist. (A man in his sixties, professor and jazz legend, playing with these young, brutal dogs might for some in the elitist jazz-world indeed cause a little shock.)

Wolf Eyes & Anthony Braxton - Rationed Rot (mp3) (from Black Vomit, a live recording at Victoriafest 2005)

'The Sound is God'. Transcendental Style in Music

2007-05-06T19:27:00.000+02:00

One of the more remarkable evolutions in Western (popular) music is its renewed attention for sound. Western (popular) music has traditionally been focused on rhythm, melody, and lyrics. In this sense, popular music seems to be deeply anti-transcendental. It’s strategy is one of identification: through melody and lyrics (mainly) it tries to arouse those emotions, for which the listener is in some way already looking (consciously or more unconsciously). Pop music is narratively structured, and creates a parallel symbolic world, which closely resembles the life-world of the listener (of course, it can look more exuberant, wealthy…). It’s a streamlined world which focuses explicitly on the whole set of basic emotions. It tell us a story about broken relationships, the joy of drinking, falling in love… No problem with this, but as such we remain with pop music fully within a flat immanence. Moreover, through its narrative structure the medium does not even seem to be fit for discovering a certain depth or transcendence within immanence. So, what would then be a transcendental style in pop music? Definitely not making it religious. Religious pop music (like Christian rock) remains locked within the same logic of identification. It tells us a story of conversion, of consolation, of hope… and tricks us into the artificial world of particular ecclesial agenda. Here, there is no depth to be found.
For a transcendental style, one will have to use the medium of pop against itself. It’s still hard for me to figure out what this precisely should be, but I believe some evolutions might give us a hint. Through a peculiar attention for sound, texture and repetition for example contemporary western artists are trying to overcome the traditional linear approach. By delving into the notes itself, by exploring the spaces between notes and by relinquishing (to a certain extent) the narrative structure, they open up a domain beneath the song. They try to explore a domain of what we can call ‘transdescens’, a form of transcendence within, or maybe better underneath the immanent sphere of the symbolic.

Added you find a raga by Pandit Pran Nath (picture above), a renowned Indian vocal master who was (as a teacher of La Monte Young and Terry Riley) of major influence in the world of Western minimalism. In the other file, Ravi Shankar shortly comments on the spirituality of music.

Six Organs of Admittance is a solo project of Ben Chasney, an American guitarist who is deeply influenced by John Fahey, but also by Indian and Japanese folk. ‘Dance among the waiting’ is from his album ‘Dust & Chimes’ (2000, Holy Mountain) and Maria from his nameless debut LP (1998, Holy Mountain).

Richard Youngs is an eclectic Scottish folk musician, known for his many collaborations and use of very diverse instruments and styles, from raga to noise and pop. ‘Sky is upon you’ is taken from ‘River Through Howling Sky’ (2004, Jagjaguwar).

Fursaxa is the solo project of Tara Burke, a singer and multu-instrumentalist from native-American origins. ‘Lunaria enters the blue lodge’ is the second song from her recent album ‘Alone in the dark wood’ (2006, ATP records).

Ravi Shankar - introductory comment: the Sound is God (mp3)

Pandit Pran Nath - Raga Darbari (mp3)

Six Organs of Admittance – Dance among the waiting (mp3)
Six Organs of Admittance – Maria (mp3)

Richard Youngs – Sky is upon you (mp3)
Fursaxa – Lunaria enters the blue lodge (mp3)

Daniel Higgs - A Modern Shaman

2007-05-02T18:38:00.000+02:00

"Have you heard that the devil is a clear blue sky?"

Daniel Higgs, known as the charismatic frontman of rockband Lungfish, bedazzles his audiences with enigmatic chants and psychedelic-repetitive songstructures. As a solo artist he plays Jewish harp or banjo; his lyrics are mantras touching on topics as alienation, the ambiguity of the divine and redemption. But quite unlike most of the recent freefolk-scene, he is driven by a pathos that uplifts his music far above the realm of musical entertainment or playful obscurity. His performances are rather 'unheimlich' through the sheer force of his voice and the playing which is full of inner tension; both, lyrics and music, reinforce each other's power, in a way he is able to open up a sphere of existential reflection seldom heard in contemporary folk.

Daniel Higgs - O Come and Walk Along (mp3) (from the LP Ancestral Songs, out on Holy Mountain records-

Loren Connors' terra incognita of the soul

2007-05-01T23:54:00.000+02:00

Loren Connors (sometimes called Loren MazzaCene Connors) is an American solo guitar-player with a peculiar attention for both detail and atmosphere. Since 1978 he has explored (and still does) the whole field of minimalistic, meditative playing, without ever sounding cheesy or losing himself within some New Age-lameness. The blues influence is obvious, but at the same time he takes his cues from avantgarde minimal composers and the experimental folk tradition, combining traditional blues elements with an spheric density, often achieved by holding on to a note. He used to play only acoustic guitar, sometimes with his wife Suzanne Langille on vocals, but mainly changed to electric guitar (with the use of pedals and distortion) since he was diagnosed with the parkinson disease. During most of his active carreer he remained unknown to audiences, but he got some recognition since the late nineties (he has collaborated with artists as Keiji Haino, Jim O'rourke, Christina Carter and John Fahey). His relative obscurity did not prevent him from being a very prolific artists: he has released about 50 albums (mostly in very limited quantities).

The track 'Child' is from 1993's Hell Kitchen Park and features his wife Susanne on vocals. The second one is taken from his album Sails (2006).

I also added two Charalambides songs, just because Tom Carter's guitar sound reminds me a lot of Connors' (on voice: Christina Carter). Both songs can be found on Glowing Raw, a 2006 CD-R release on 'Wholly Other' records.

Loren Connors - Child (mp3)
Loren Connors - Trinity, pt. 3 (mp3)

Charalambides - Give me Jesus (mp3)

Charalambides - Vanity, Look in Passing (mp3)

Epistemological Explorations I. Taylor’s Anglo-American Concept of Modernity

2007-04-26T16:21:00.000+02:00

In ‘What is Secularity?’, a recent article by Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher develops a conceptual scheme to understand the shift from a premodern, religious perspective to a modern, secular way of living. Crucial would here be the emergence of what he calls ‘closed world systems’ (CWS), as world systems which leave no place for the ‘vertical’ or ‘transcendent’. In order to understand better the phenomenon of Modernity, he therefore investigates different versions of CWS as ways in which people, who claim to be modern and secular, legitimate their position vis-à-vis religious people (who are then labelled as premodern from the perspective of CWS). His actual aim becomes clear at the end: to reconcile the spirit of Modernity with the possibility of religious belief, and so to deconstruct all at least rigid versions of CWS (he received the 2007 Templeton-prize). I will first shortly present Taylor’s account of CWS. In a second part, I will try to indicate how Taylor lures us into his conclusion by presenting a too flat image of modern secularity, and how he silently switches from a descriptive to a normative level. This last heavily weighs on the status of his conclusion, for his conclusion presented as normative might finally be nothing more than a philosophical generalization of a world system which fits his own psychological constitution.

Basically he identifies two main forms of CWS, the first as a strictly epistemological version, the second as a more existential one. They do not exclude each other; the second is mainly a more sophisticated, broader one. CWS 1: this comes down to the specific structure of modern epistemology, which operates “with a picture of knowing agents as individuals, who build up their understanding of the world through combining and relating, in more and more comprehensive theories, the information which they take in and which is couched in inner representations.” (Taylor, 59) Characteristic is then a series of priority relations, which do not only tell us what is learned before what, but what can be inferred on the basis of what. Applied: one starts with mental pictures, and from there on one affirms the existence of the outer world; then, on the basis of this trust in experience one starts making more complex scientific claims, for example about the laws of the universe. Thus, one always has to start with the natural, and claims about the transcendent are necessarily at the most fragile end of a series of inferences. Further, CWS 1 proclaims the primacy of the individual’s sense of self over society. The subject of science is a disengaged, independent subject, controlling his own thought-processes. He/She is not driven by particular interests or values, but claims to proceed on the basis of a pure epistemological, scientific method. We can be short here about Taylor’s critique, for it’s the same as for CWS 2: CWS 1 claims to be neutral, but it is not. It only functions because the adherents are driven by a specific set of values.
CWS 2 is labeled by Taylor as the ‘death of God’ paradigm. This tells us that “conditions have arisen in the modern world in which it is no longer possible – honestly, rationally, without confusion or fudging, or mental reservation – to believe in God.” (Taylor, 62) As a result, we are left with only human affairs, for belief in something transcendent is now seen as emanating from a childish lack of courage. Concerning the origins of the conditions which have arisen, Taylor identifies two sorts: “first, and most important, the deliverances of science; and then, secondarily, the shape of contemporary moral experience.” (Taylor, 63). The first is so strong, because Taylor believes the whole trust of modern science is to establish an all-around materialism. Modern science is not only interested in investigating very specific objects with their strict method of so-called neutral observance, but functions as a meta-narrative. In other words: it functions as a specific ideology. Adherents claim their package of truths is plausible, because science would have shown this and that, but what actually drives them is the broader project of a materialism, which is in itself not epistemically driven. This brings us to the second origin, as actually inseparable from Taylor’s deconstruction of the first: the ‘death of God’ paradigm is founded on a specific moral, humanist project: what matters are human affairs (welfare, human rights, human flourishing…) and this leaves no place for belief in God. In his words: “my contention is that the power of materialism today comes not from the scientific ‘facts’, but has rather to be explained in terms of the power of a certain package uniting materialism with a moral outlook, the package we could call ‘atheist humanism’ or exclusive humanism.” (Taylor, 67) His strategy is double: first, he states that epistemically the transition from science to full-blown materialism is unconvincing, that it is always full of holes (his examples here are evolution-theory, sociobiology and the work of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett). Second, he tries to show that people are in fact moved by certain values and that this undercuts their own image of objective research. Of course, Taylor stress on CWS as one, historically constructed understanding of human agency is not meant as a further purification of the scientific method. What he tries to argue for is that all types of understanding are always historically constructed, that there is no neutral gaze. This however does not imply a return to premodern understanding. He laments that the moral order of CWS 2 is formulated on the basis of a substraction-theory (at least by the adherents): it is formulated on a negative basis, as a doing-away with everything which might be an obstruction for human welfare (thus in the first a transcendent authority as God). What we should defend instead is a modern project as sustained by a positive visions of the good; and this might on its turn leave more room for transcendence, myths…

Till so far Taylor’s presentation. My objections concern his presentation of CWS 1 & 2 as typical for Modernity and the logical consistency of his critique and own positive proposal. I might agree with Taylor that we should not forget that Modernity has its own positive spiritual vision. But first: that it should not be conceived as a particular story is inseparably linked with its spiritual vision; and second, the positive spiritual vision is precisely the discovery of transcendence. Of course, modern transcendence has nothing to do with the existence of God. But this does not mean we’re lacking transcendence as such. The religious claim depends on an ontology no longer accepted by modern standards. Moreover, from a modern point of view, what was called transcendence becomes debunked as a foundational principle within Being; God as a highest Being, which is as such not something transcendent but a function of human understanding in search of a highest principle. The discovery of Modernity then concerns a transcending of Being within the sphere of human subjectivity. The human subject is understood as not locked up within the phenomenal sphere, but as opened (from the inside) towards what eludes its grip (this from Kant’s notion of the noumenal, to Levinas’ autrement qu’être, Derrida’s Khora and Lacan’s Real). Moreover, Taylor’s conviction that Modern epistemology is driven by an attempt to establish a full-blown materialism does not seem hold. In his description of CWS 1 he refers to the classic sources of modern epistemology, but some of the most crucial figures here do not envisage something as materialism. Let’s just take Kant: his epistemology is mainly in line with Taylor’s description of CWS 1. But it’s hard to see the connection with what Taylor describes in CWS 2. Kant’s philosophy is thoroughly dualistic, and his moral project has not much to do with materialism or naturalism (the same holds for Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Derrida…). Taylor’s account of CWS 2 is therefore mainly a Anglo-American version of Modernity, as a version which is a rather simplistic rendering of the original one (just look at his examples: Dawkins, Dennet…).

Let’s deal now with Taylor’s own method. His whole argument seems based on a problematic shift from a psychological-descriptive level to a normative one. In his critique on both CWS 1 and 2 he mainly states that most adherents do not stick to it on epistemological or scientific grounds: he perceives that they are driven to it on the basis of a particular package of values which is compelling for them. We are here on a descriptive level, and it is indeed very likely that it mostly works like this: people are in need of a certain worldview which fits their own (psychological) needs, although they will not legitimate their worldview by referring to attractivity of the values implied by their worldview. In this case, one of the options is to display a new honesty: to admit that our worldview is just a particular, historically constructed story, which we have chosen, not because it is so epistemically compelling, but because its moral package fits us best. This is the road Charles Taylor wants us to take. But why wouldn’t there be another option? Why should we admit that CWS 1 compels for different reasons than epistemological ones? That a lot of the adherents have an extrinsic motivation tells us nothing about the validity of the epistemology itself, nor about its power to convince. In Taylor’s words: “the whole package (of CWS 1 and 2) is meant to plausible precisely because science has shown… and so on. That’s certainly the way the package […] presents itself officially; that’s the official story. But the supposition here is that the official story isn’t the real one; that the real power that the package has to attract and to convince lies in it as a definition of our moral predictment.” (Taylor 64). Again: this might be true for a lot of the adherents, but it tells us nothing about the possibility of being epistemically driven. A reaction to Taylor’s descriptive analysis, from the perspective of CWS 1 could therefore be as follow: ‘thank you very much Mr. Taylor for your sharp observation. There were indeed a lot of people claiming to be part of CWS 1, but there membership was false. Their motivation was extrinsic, and from now on all these people will be expelled. They do not longer represent CWS 1.’ And it might be possible that are not many left in this case of purification. But the quantity of adherents has nothing to do with the validity of the official story, namely that science itself has the power to compel. Taylor thus switches silently from a pure descriptive to a normative perspective. He switches from the mere observation to the idea that it always should be like this.
Of course, Taylor knows that the mere observation of extrinsic motives does not really discredit the validity of the epistemology itself. He therefore also comes up with an epistemic response. This is correct in the light of a modern epistemological approach (and even necessary for a dialogue with CWS 1/2), but it becomes highly problematic in the light of his own philosophy. We have already mentioned his actual response above: to him all the arguments from modern science to materialism are unconvincing, and the theories are full of holes. But why would we believe this? His whole philosophy is an attempt to show that what drives us is a particular ethical worldview, and not the so-called neutral insights of epistemology and science; there are no neutral observations, for all observations already reflect the larger ethical package for which one has chosen. He defends this theory in general and applies it here to CWS 1 and 2; but this also holds for his own philosophy. Therefore: his argument that modern epistemology is unconvincing is not to be taken as neutrally valid, but it is already the reflection of his own particular worldview. Further: his whole attack on epistemology in general is thus not based on his the actual insight into the weaknesses of epistemological reflection, but already the logical outcome of his own moral package. To understand then why he reacts so harsh against (modern) epistemology, we only have to take a look at this package of him: Taylor wants to be religious and modern at the same time. In his package he wants to embrace modern ethical values, while remaining a religious person who believes in the existence of God. He knows that this combination is hard to achieve while holding on to a strict epistemological reflection, and thus turns epistemology itself into an enemy. To be coherent, I believe Taylor should have refrained from an epistemic response (remember the option of honesty: do not pretend your argument is neutral) and embrace a harsh relativism; but then this would undermine his modern ethical project.

(I will later argue why Alasdair MacIntyre and John Milbank present more convincing versions of a similar argument; MacIntyre by giving up on a modern ethical project and Milbank by truly embracing the radical relativism still eschewed by both Taylor and MacIntyre)

Reference: C. Taylor, What is Secularity?, in K. Vanhoozer & M. Warner (eds.), Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology. Reason, Meaning and Experience, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, 57-76.

Ignatz

2007-04-23T11:42:00.000+02:00

Belgian FreeFolk-DroneBlues

The blues may find its historical roots in American negro-songs, Ignatz (the alter ego of Bram Devens) shows us how universal the language of blues has become. With just an acoustic guitar, some pedals and a sampler (sometimes also voice) Ignatz creates his own universe of broken-down and slowly rebuild melodies, of meandering finger-picking guitarlines subtly surrounded by haunting distortion. And what is so amazing about it: it all sounds so natural; like he was born 100 years ago in the Appalachian Mountains and has played this kind of music for ages. The obvious reference is of course John Fahey. But instead of just becoming a Fahey-adept, he manages to find his own voice, injecting some more Asian/Indian raga-elements, together with contemporary noise/drone influences.

Ignatz - Drawn (mp3)
(Taken from "Addiction for Slumber", a 2006 Tape Release)

Traversing Particularity. From Badiou back to Kant

2007-04-21T02:37:00.000+02:00

Zu fragmentarisch ist mir Welt und Leben! Ich will mich zum deutschen Professor begeben. Der weiß das Leben zusammenzusetzen, Und er macht ein verständlich System daraus; mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus

Heinrich Heine

I. Introduction

In this small poem, Heinrich Heine can be read as prefiguring the project of postmodern consciousness. In his picture of the German professor, he actually distrusts all possible attempts to develop a Totalsystem. Of course, he dreams of a homecoming within a final whole, but he is too much aware of what he calls the gaps of the universe, of the impossibility of a direct access to or adequate representation of Being itself. He suffers from what in postmodernity is called the crisis of representation and what has become a rather general human condition, at least in the West. However, when we take a look now at contemporary philosophy, something strange seems to happen. A widely influential philosopher as Alain Badiou for example is trying to come up with some kind of post-postmodernity. He laments the anti-platonism, the distrust of speculative metaphysics and the hermeneutic perspectivism of postmodernity and urges for a classical, anti-kantian philosophy which would enable us to counter the false modesty of modern and postmodern consciousness.

My question here will be: is Badiou justified in making a radical distinction between his project and (post)modern philosophy? Badiou himself is often keen to criticise postmodern writers, especially for their linguistic charlatanry and playful scepticism, but he might stand closer to some of them as presumed. With his notion of pure event, he tried to escape classical monism and in his privileging of singularity he comes quite close to writers as Bataille, Derrida and Lacan. He even seems to offer a Sartrean dualism without mediation, for there seems to be no relation between the meaningfulness of an event and the meaninglessness of the cosmos of infinite sets.[1] But especially the similarities with a Kantian project are striking. Both Kant and Badiou establish a sort of direct relation between the singular and the universal. In contrast to the still largely prevailing Hegelian model, the access to the universal does not run through the mediation of particularity. Particularity is traversed, but it does not function as what uplifts us in the direction of universality. Moreover, the so-called Sartrean dualism can in fact be traced back to Kant, and more precisely to his anti-cosmism which prevents the subject to conceive itself as the highest creature in the chain of being. The Kantian/modern subject is radically out-of-joint, it has no place within the positive order of Being.

Of course, this is not meant as a scholarly comment on the work of Badiou. I would like to focus here shortly on Badiou because he could help us avoiding the pitfalls of particularism and reinforcing our faith in universal truth. In contrast to Badiou, I would however not label this as a counter-(post)modern movement. We have often been presented with a false or at least quite distorted picture of postmodernity as the consciousness of particularity. The essence of postmodernity would consist of the awareness of the particularity (contextuality) of all truth-claims. And this is true: all claims are particular; but, it is too often interpreted in a hermeneutic sense that we are locked up in a set of particular narratives. The consciousness of particularity is only one side of the story. We could therefore label the modern/postmodern subject, with a notion of Hegel, as ‘unhappy consciousness’, as split between the mastery of being a universal negating consciousness and the slavery of being just a miserable contingent individual. The unhappy consciousness does not cover up particularity, as the stoic does, nor does he cover up universality as the sceptic does. In this sense, there is a straight line connecting Kant, Kierkegaard and Derrida, as three forms of unhappy consciousness. But I’ll come back to this at the end.

II. Badiou’s cultural critique: the problem of communitarianism

Let me start here with Badiou’s cultural critique and his furious attack on what he calls the reduction of the question of truth to a linguistic form. Together with an author as Slavoj Zizek, he refuses the postmodern common-sense ‘anti-essentialist’ identity politics according to which there are no men or women as such, but only white-middle class women, black lesbians, single mothers….[2] He rejects these insights as trivial, for the philosophical question actually lies in how the universality of ‘men’ or ‘women’ emerges out of the endless multitude. But there is more at stake then just philosophical laziness. Badiou tries to point out that the real unifying factor behind the attempt to promote the cultural virtue of oppressed subsets consists of “monetary abstraction, whose false universality has absolutely no difficulty accommodating the kaleidoscope of communitarianisms.”[3] In others words: if one claims that we can no longer tell master-narratives, this logic works neo-conservative, for it allows the space between the micro-stories to be occupied by the master-narrative of neo-liberal capitalism. On the one side, he thus perceives an extension of the automatisms of capital, this as the world-market whose configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization.[4] On the other side, he discerns a process of fragmentation into closed identities. But both processes, of globalisation and tribalization, are perfectly intertwined. “For each identification creates a figure that provides a material for investment by the market.” Abstract universality and the particularity of interests proper to a subset, are finally two sides of the same coin. Badiou's program can therefore be stated as such: to break free from the spell of communitarianism and to establish again the idea of a universalist truth-procedure. Or in his own words: “Ultimately it is a case of mobilizing a universal singularity both against the prevailing abstraction (legal then, economic now) and against communitarian or particularist protest.”[5]

III. Being and Event (From Sartrean Dualism to Deleuzian/Spinozist Monism?)

To work out his program, Badiou mainly focuses on the question of ontology and what he calls the event. The latter will allow us to understand his notion of subjectivity. In the beginning of his book on Saint Paul, Badiou therefore explains his philosophical project as an attempt “to refound a theory of the Subject that subordinates its existence to the aleatory dimension of the event as well as to the pure contingency of multiple being.”[6] For him ontology itself is a matter of mathematics, in which the totality of Being is understood as an infinite set of sets. The only problem with mathematics is that it remains unable to come to terms with Being as such, with Being as Being. In its abstract procedure it only has a relation to Being as far as it is represented. The real ground of Being is the simple fact that it happens. The infinite set of sets is thus not founded on some other eternal ground, but rests on the contingency of happening, as the groundless ground of Being. Badiou therefore speaks about the event, as something which escapes the totality of representations and in which Being as such presents itself. Being as such (not as represented, but as presentation) is thus not a set, as other sets. It’s only present as an empty set, and it only presents itself in detached elements; detached, in the sense that they are no longer a part of one of the existing specific sets. What thus happens in an event, is that the existing order of sets is disturbed; it reveals that at the root of every order, there is no specific constellation of sets grounded in an ultimate ontological principle. Ultimately, every order resides in pure contingency; the contingency as the happening of Being itself. Truth becomes then a matter of faithfulness to the event. In the event, as a singular happening, all particularistic notions of truth are unmasked, for these are only dependent on settled constellations of sets, masking the contingency of Being itself. The subject of the event is thus the bearer of faith in an empty set, as the only set which can lay a claim to universality.

Let us take the example of Saint Paul. Badiou turns to him, not because he believes Paul’s claim about Jesus’ resurrection (he is a radical atheist), but because he would have established such a universalist truth-procedure. “Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of people, a city, an empire, a territory or a social class. What is true cannot be reduced to any objective aggregate.”[7] Of course, to designate the event Paul uses the word ‘resurrection’. Nevertheless, we should be able to look further than this as a claim with a specific theological content. In using the word ‘resurrection’ Paul undermined the existing discourses of his time. He focused on the site where all the particular discourses lost their representative ground. In contrast with the settled position of the Jews and the Greek, Paul thus came to look Being right in the eye. In experiencing the failure of the existing discourses, he was confronted with the pure contingency of Being itself, as a singular experience which opens up a universalism, for all people actually share in this contingency. Resurrection designates for Badiou thus finally Paul’s affirmation of Being itself, of the life-giving contingency and so of the impossible Real, not understood as the horror of death but as the source of life. As such Badiou formally repeats a certain Lacanian move, but also seems to establish a specific dualism. We enter the world of truth through grace as a pure and simple encounter, and the world of particularity can never function as a mediation. There is a direct connection between the singular and the universal, and the world of truth as such remains opposed to the world of particularity. Of course, Badiou knows that we live in a world of particularity, but truth can only be established by traversing all particular differences.[8]

The problem with this analysis is however that Badiou’s story does not end here and that he risks to smuggle particularity and mediation surreptitiously back in. The graceful encounter with the Real can be understood as revolution: it shatters the existing configuration of discourses. Till so far, there is not really a problem of mediation. But Badiou also believes that on the basis of this revolution a new politics can be grounded in which the encounter can be solidified. First, he thus seems to presuppose that every true revolution turns out as something positive. But can he do that? The criterium for a true revolution is absolutely formal: what matters is the connection with the contingent happening of Being as such, and the rupture with settled, particular systems of truth. So in some way he is implicitly claiming that Being itself is something good: a claim he cannot make on the basis of his formal approach[9]. Second, how can a political system be directly founded on an encounter with the Real, without turning it into a new symbolic order, and so without smuggling particularity back in? Badiou presents his politics as a pure politics and he is keen to argue that this politics has left behind the mediation of a Hegelian economy.[10] But can this convince? As if his maoist program is devoid of very particular preferences, as if a political system at all can be devoid of particular preferences? Purity as a kind of solidified state remains highly doubtful and we might do better, for the sake of good politics, not to think here in terms of purity.

IV. Retrieving Kant’s anti-ontological trust

In the solidification of the event, Badiou thus risks to undermine his own intent. He stresses that the Event is unforeseeable in terms of the existing conditions and that the Event cannot have any ontological guarantee[11]. It cannot be reduced to, or deduced from a previous situation. It escapes the ontological representation of Being, although it emerges from Being as presentation. In this sense, Badiou agrees with Zizek that true evil does not lie in an excess of subjectivity as such, but in its ‘ontologization’, in its reinscription into some positive order of Being. At once, this is for both the great insight of Christianity, that “the global cosmic ‘chain of Being’ is not ‘all there is’, that there is another Order (of ideas) which suddenly emerges and which suspends the validity of the Order of Being”[12]. Nevertheless, in the case of Badiou it remains doubtable if he is able to uphold this rupture. Let’s take an example that he uses himself: he considers the Russian October revolution as an Event, and admits that Stalin betrays the Event by turning it into new positive order of Being. But where do we draw the line? Can we make such a strict distinction between a Leninist and Stalinist relation to the Event? It is more plausible that the Stalinist ontologization is already at least prepared by installing a political and thus coercive regime on the basis of the Event. Badiou all too easily presumes that an inner relation can be adequately captured by an outward system, and that such a system would be at once able to remain an open logic, and thus not a new particular subset. Moreover, his understanding of the subject as the product of faithfulness to the Event, risks to reinstall the ideology he is precisely trying to fight himself. He insists on the immanence of the Truth-event and so has to admit that the Truth of the Event only appears for the Agents and not for external observers. This means that an Event is only recognizable as a true Event, if one has already taken the decision to be an agent of the Event. In other words: one has to be part of the club, to recognize the truth (which turns Badiou of course into an anti-communitarian communitarian).

My suggestion is therefore that we conceive the relation between subject and event differently. In other words: we have to turn Badiou into a Kantian. But beware: I’m not referring here to Kant as the German professor of Heine’s poem, but as the unhappy consciousness who is aware that the order of Being in itself remains non-totalizable, that the ‘Lücken des Welltbaus’ can never be chinked up, for in a Kantian logic das Weltall is itself dependent on a finite subject. As Heidegger has argued in his discussion with Ernst Cassirer, the transcendental subject has to be understood as a Dazwischen, unable to flee into an eternal absolute, nor into the world of things, of particularity.[13] Too often, one has interpreted the Kantian Subject as the Stoic of Hegel’s scheme, as freely operating in a sphere of pure noumenality, and as unattached by a condition of contingency. But if we take a closer look, especially at his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, we see how Kant himself wrestles with the problem of a split subjectivity. At some point, he even explicitly praises nature for our bad creation, for our dim and ambiguous sight: if we would be able to leave fully behind all the contingency or the pathological order of particular inclinations, there would not be any moral struggle, and our moral relation would become pure mechanical. As in a puppet show, we would gesticulate everything perfectly, but it would be a lifeless happening.[14] As such, Kant thus reintroduces the problem fragmentation, but now in the heart of the human subject, as split between two heterogeneous intentionalities. However, it remains important to see that this not a support or supplement of the cultural fragmentation Badiou is trying to oppose. As humans, we all share the split of subjectivity; the split is a universal condition, and only if we are ready to embrace this condition as universal, will we be able to oppose the communitarian seduction.
Of course, Badiou could protest against the Kantian universality that it remains an abstract universality, and that by consequence it works itself in favour of communitarian perspectivism, very much like in the case of capitalism. And I’m afraid he has a point. But here, it might eventually be possible to supplement Kant with Badiou’s logic of the Event, (without however turning the subject into a product of this event.) As an example of how we reach universality, Badiou takes the gender-distinction and defends the position that we only come to know the disjunction between men and women as a universal truth about humanity, through the encounter of this difference in the amorous relation. In and through love we realize the truth about the difference between sexuated positions. The same goes for politics, science and art: the truth of these domains is finally a truth for everyone, although it becomes only realized through the concrete encounter of the event. Till so far, I’m tempted to agree with Badiou. But could we not affirm both positions at once?: and the subject precedes the encounter, and the subject realizes herself through the encounter. As Derrida argues against all strong conceptions of revelation, Offenbarkeit has to precede Offenbarung, and nor Levinas, neither Marion can do away with the transcendental condition of understanding. One must be able to understand the other, in order to remain faithfull to the call of the other. The same might therefore hold for Badiou’s Evental interruption. If he really wants to install a singular-universal connection, and if the universal means ‘for everyone, independent of having any particular determinations’[15], he must in some way admit that we should all be receptive for the events, through which we realize the truth of love, science, politics and art and thus ourselves; he will have to admit that a transcendental subjectivity cannot be made dependent on the encounter, and that only on the basis of this transcendentality he can adequately counter the relativistic glorifying of particularity.

[1] For the critique of dualism, cf. for example Catherine Pickstock, The Univocalist Mode of Production, in C. Davis, J. Milbank & S. Zizek, Theology and the Political. The New Debate, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 315.
[2] Cf. for example, S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 133.
[3] A. Badiou. Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, p 7.
[4] Ibid., p. 9.
[5] Ibid., p. 14.
[6] Ibid., p. 4.
[7] Ibid., p.5.
[8] This does not mean however, that Paul is trying to abolish particular differences. His strategy is more subtle. Take for example his relation to what is Jewish. As Rom 9:1-6 makes clear, Paul’s relation to the Jews is essentially positive. It is therefore not all Paul’s aim to discredit particularity. But he finally praises particularity only to be able to traverse it. In Badiou’s words: “Paul fights against all those who would submit postevental universality to Jewish particularity. […] The task Paul sets for himself is obviously not that of abolishing Jewish particularity, which he constantly acknowledges as the event’s principle of historicity, but that of animating it internally by everything of which it is capable relative to the new discourse, and hence the new subject.”[8] Moreover, Paul does not conceal his own strategy here: “To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law – though not being myself under the law – that I might win those under the law. […] I have become all things to all men” (Cor. I.9:19-22). A similar ambiguity concerns the question of separation. In Badiou’s reading Paul’s universalism does not exclude all forms of separation, but the separation involved is itself intertwined with universalism. The actual separation is between the old man and the new man: through our faith in the event, we have separated ourselves from the old man, and out of this separation the newness of life is born. What distinguishes Paul then from Jewish ‘communitarianism’ is that there is no limit to this separation. “It proposes something that is open to everybody, a collective determination, the realization of a separation in a universal field.[…] The division is internal to the subject itself.” A. Badiou, An Interview with Alain Badiou. “Universal Truths and the Question of Religion”, in Journal of Philosopy and Scripture 3/1 (2005) 38-42, p. 40. For Badiou, this implies that there can never be a closure, nor a new fixed system of particular truths.
[9] Mark de Kesel therefore speaks about Badiou’s catholic ontology. Cf. M. De Kesel, Ontologie als katholicisme. Over Alain Badiou’s Paulusinterpretatie, in Yang…
[10] Just as also Paul does without mediation. Cf. A. Badiou, p. 48.
[11] Cf. A. Badiou, Eight Theses on the Universal, in A. Badiou, Theoretical Writing, New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 143-152, p. 145: “A universal singularity is not of the order of being, but of the order of a sudden emergence.”
[12] S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 133.
[13] Cf. Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger, in M. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Frankfurt a.M., Vittorio Klostermann, 1998, p. 274-296, p. 279: “Kant spricht von der Vernunft des Menschen als Selbsthalterin, d.h. einer Vernunft, die rein auf sich selbst gestellt ist und sich nicht flüchten kann in ein Ewiges, Absolutes, sich aber auch nicht flüchten kann in die Welt der Dinge. Dieses Dazwischen ist das Wesen der praktischen Vernunft.”
[14] I. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, A 265: “Das Verhalten der Menschen, so lange ihre Natur, wie sie jetzt ist, bliebe, würde also in einen bloßen Mechanismus verwandelt werden, wo, wie im Marionettenspiel, alles gut gestikulieren, aber in den Figuren doch kein Leben anzutreffen sein sein würde.”
[15] Cf. A. Badiou, Eight Theses on the Universal, in A. Badiou, Theoretical Writing, New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 143-152, p 151.

George Bataille's Impossible Dualism. Towards a Postmodern Gnosticism

2007-04-20T19:36:00.000+02:00

“The non-narrative fascinates me so much because it’s so close to real life. Non-narrative is how we live, although everyone thinks to live ‘narrative’. Or thinks that there is a story or meaning guiding their live. Nothing is less true. The narrative idea is only there to give us a satisfied feeling.”

This is quote by Jonathan Weiss, a young filmmaker who adapted into movie J. G. Ballard’s book ‘the atrocity exhibition’, and who laments that nearly all cinema proceeds in a narrative way. But the problem pof cinema is symptomatical . A lot of contemporary theology (hermeneutic theology, liberationist theology, Radical Orthodoxy) is a theology of mediation, in which the access to the universal is mediated by the particular. My question is therefore: can we still imagine a different option, namely the possibility of a singularity which cannot be inscribed within a particular chain of meaning, which disrupts and cannot be mediated? To explore this question, I will focus mainly on Bataille, who in his critique of Hegel, has deeply struggled with this question. In a second a part, I will also deal with the thought of Badiou, who at first sights adopts a similar dualism.
Of course, I know that the attempt to escape Hegel has been a major theme in the whole of postmodern philosophy, but what bothers me is that often they have too easily presented it as a promising ethical and political enterprise. They were too much of a democracy-to-come delegation. With Bataille, we get a different, and maybe more honest postmodernism, stripped from its liberal-political promises, with a little more drama and some sharper edges.

II. Bataille’s Dualism

Bataille’s relation to Hegel is a quite ambiguous one, and it’s hard to distil a systematic critique out of his very unsystematic writing. He also didn’t just want to oppose Hegel, for he knew all too well that in simply opposing him, he would not escape him. As he therefore says himself: “My efforts recommence and undo Hegel’s Phenomenology.”[1] Nevertheless, I will try to identify some of the recurrent themes in his discussion of Hegel, or maybe better the French Hegel. In the thirties Bataille attended the famous lectures of Kojève on Hegel and mainly kept on reading him through the lens of the widely influential Kojève-interpretation. Bataille’s main criticism is however not focused on the thesis of the end of history; nor does he lament Hegel’s stress on the labour of the negative. In some way, he seems to agree with Kojève that we have reached the end of history. Everything what could be achieved is already achieved. All work is done. But what happens with the negative?

“If action is – as Hegel says – negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has ‘nothing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of ‘unemployed negativity’. Personally, I can only decide in one way, being myself precisely this ‘unemployed negativity’.[…] I imagine that my life – or, better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life – constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel’s closed system.”[2]

The negative is for both Hegel and Bataille the fuel of all dialectics. And Bataille himself does not oppose dialectics itself: the self-consciousness proceeds dialectically. What Bataille reproaches both Kojève and Hegel for, is that they do not take negativity seriously enough. The negative can include everything; everything can be its object. But the negative cannot include itself. Thus, when everything is negated, what remains is an unemployed negativity, as negativity without content. Bataille speaks here about a desire for nothing and about a desire to lose rather than to gain. This gives way to the inner experience, as a movement towards an infinitely withdrawing object. Crucial is that the ‘umemployed negativity’ implies a rupture with the immanence of the Hegelian economy in which the meaning of any negation still lies in the anticipated result.[3] As such, it opens a domain of an otherness that resists integration. This is however not the Levinasian otherness of the other. Its features are rather those of the il y a or maybe more of the mystical night, but then discovered through an analysis of self-consciousness and understanding. To road to divinity here is a highway of despair and the divinity itself that which does not give any satisfaction.

In a very Hegelian mode thus, the proceeding is dialectal, as a process within self-consciousness trying to come to terms with the abyss it has found in its heart. But in contrast with Hegel, the evolution is not one from the unknown to the known.[4] Finally, the human subject discovers that his understanding is always haunted by a blind spot.[5] The recognition of this opens the domain of the unknown. The subject realises that what truly matters is not what can be known, but what resists the Hegelian inclusion.

In L’Expérience intérieure, he imagines Hegel himself having reached this extreme limit.

“He was still young and believed himself to be going mad. I even imagine that he worked out the system in order to escape.[…] His memory brought him back to the perceived abyss, in order to annul it. The system is the annulment.”[6]

Now, this is not to say that Hegel actually excluded all sovereign moments from his account of history. The problem is that Hegel finally inscribed them within a totalizing discourse which strips them from there irreducibility. They again become part of a regime of servile labour. Hegel therefore would have been deeply embarrassed with things as poetry, laughter, and ecstasy which are never means to an end. In itself, they open up the domain of the sacred.

The core duality of Bataille’s thought is thus between the profane and the sacred. In a first moment, this distinction can be read along the lines of the double intentionality of self-consciousness, very much like in the case of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. For Bataille, the human being is split between the mastery of sovereign life and the slavery of having to work and to be part of an everyday profane system. This double intentionality then implies a distinction between two economies. The logic of the profane is determined by an economy of accumulation. Here, every gift, every risk, all negativity exists for the sake of a higher, and so a finally positive good. The logic of the sacred is one of pure expenditure, of waste: there are no goods to obtain, there is no work to be done and no projects to be realized. Here, we are lost in the dark night of the soul; we enter the unknown and do not longer know what happens to us.

Of course, there are several problems connected to his critique of Hegel, and his own construal of the duality and the inner experience. For he tries at the same time to contest two traditions: first, theological and mystical notions of the sacred sphere as a beyond, and second, the Hegelian location of the “beyond” within the sphere of discourse. That the exteriority of the sacred should not be read as a separate ontological sphere, as a Hinterwelt, should be clear for him:

“It [the inner experience] robs of meaning everything that is an intellectual or moral beyond, substance, God or immutable order, or salvation. It is an apotheosis of that which is perishable, apotheosis of alcohol and flesh as well as of the trances of mysticism. […] It renews the kind of tragic jubilation that man ‘is’ as soon as he stops behaving like a cripple, glorifying necessary work and letting himself be emasculated by the fear of tomorrow.”[7]

So while at one point, we see Bataille approaching the divine in a very similar way as Hegel, namely as a journey of self-consciousness, he nevertheless comes in his criticism of Hegel quite close to the mystical idea of unmediated union with the divine (and an ontological understanding of the externality).

Some commentators (as Mark De Kesel and in his vein Slavoj Zizek) have tried to solve the riddle by assuming Bataille tends toward an antique, closed worldview.[8] They argue that Bataille understands Being from an energetic point of view, according to which a self-wasting energy lives within everything and outlives everything. Nevertheless, as such they all too easily risk to cover up the way Bataille struggles to avoid this and other kinds of monism. For finally Bataille always confronts himself with the tension between on one side the inability to live outside of language and on the other side the necessity to somehow escape the work of language. And precisely this tension makes it impossible for him to develop an overarching ontology. I will come back to this later. Let me first make a little detour.

III. Badiou. On the surreptitious Hegelianism of a Political reading (or the Betrayal of Dualism)

Georges Bataille was not the only one trying to oppose Hegelian monism, in a new plea for a dualist approach. Sartre, also influenced by Kojève, tried to defend a strict dualism between the en-soi and the pour-soi, and in some way several other French postmodern writers tried to counter monism in a quite similar way. I therefore like to focus on a maybe less obvious parallel, namely the work of Alain Badiou, this in order to understood better the actual nature of Bataille dualism.

Badiou himself is often keen to criticise postmodern writers, especially for their linguistic charlatanry and their false modesty, but he might stand closer to some of them as presumed. With his notion of pure event, he also tried to escape Hegelianism and in his privileging of singularity he comes quite close Bataille. He even seems to offer a Sartrean dualism without mediation, for there seems to be no relation between the meaningfulness of an event and the meaninglessness of his cosmos of infinite sets.[9] But is this really the case, and what would be the difference with Bataille?
In the beginning of his book on Paul, Badiou explains his philosophical project and his attention for Paul as an attempt “to refound a theory of the Subject that subordinates its existence to the aleatory dimension of the event as well as to the pure contingency of multiple being.” For him ontology is a matter of mathematics, in which the totality of Being is understood as an infinite set of sets. The only problem with mathematics is that it remains unable to come to terms with Being as such, with Being as Being. In its abstract procedure it only has a relation to Being as far as it is represented. The real ground of Being is the simple fact that it happens. The infinite set of sets is thus not founded on some other eternal ground, but rests on the contingency of happening, as the groundless ground of Being. Badiou therefore speaks about the event, as something which escapes the totality of representations and in which Being as such presents itself. Being as such (as not represented, but as presentation) is thus not a set, as other sets. It’s only present as an empty set, and it only presents itself in detached elements; detached, in the sense that they are no longer a part of one of the existing specific sets. What thus happens in an event, is that the existing order of sets is disturbed; it reveals that at root of every order, there is not a specific constellation of sets grounded in an ultimate ontological principle. Ultimately, every order resides in pure contingency; the contingency as the happening of Being itself. Truth then becomes then a matter of faithfulness to the event. In the event, as a singular happening, all particularistic notions of truth are unmasked, for these are only dependent on settled constellations of sets, masking the contingency of Being itself. The subject of the event is thus the bearer of faith in an empty set, as the only set which can lay a claim to universality.

Let us take the example of Paul. Badiou turns to him, not because he believes Paul’s claim about Jesus’ resurrection, but because he would have established such a universalist truth-procedure. “Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of people, a city, an empire, a territory or a social class. What is true cannot be reduced to any objective aggregate.”[10] Of course, to designate the event Paul uses the word ‘resurrection’. Nevertheless, we should be able to look further than this as a claim with a specific theological content. In using the word ‘resurrection’ Paul undermined the existing discourses of his time. He focused on the site where all the particular discourses lost their representative ground. In contrast with the settled position of the Jews and the Greek, Paul thus came to look Being right in the eye. In experiencing the failure of the existing discourses, he was confronted with the pure contingency of Being itself, as a singular experience which opens up a universalism, for all people actually share in this contingency. Resurrection designates for Badiou thus finally Paul’s affirmation of Being itself, of the life-giving contingency and so of the impossible Real, not understood as the horror of death but as the source of life. As such Badiou formally repeats a certain Lacanian move, but also seems to come close to Bataille’s dualism. We enter the world of truth through grace as a pure and simple encounter, and the world of particularity can never function as a mediation. There is a direct connection between the singular and the universal, and the world of truth as such remains opposed to the world of particularity. Of course, Badiou knows that we live in a world of particularity, but truth can only be established by traversing all particular differences.

The problem with this analysis is however that Badiou’s story does not end here and that he risks to smuggle particularity and mediation surreptitiously back in. The graceful encounter with the Real can be understood as revolution: it shatters the existing configuration of discourses. Till so far, there is not really a problem of mediation. But Badiou also believes that on the basis of this revolution a new politics can be grounded in which the encounter can be solidified. First, he thus seems to presupposes that every true revolution turns out as something positive. But can he do that?: the criterium for a true revolution is absolutely formal: what matters is the connection with Being as such, and the rupture with settled, particular systems of truth. So in some way he is surreptitiously claiming that Being itself is something good: a claim he cannot make on the basis of his formal approach. Bataille is therefore more coherent (and maybe also in a similar vein Nietzsche and Lacan), for not establishing the encounter with truth as the birth of a new political system: the Real is beyond good and evil, and the encounter is just as horrific as beautiful. Second, how can a political system be directly founded on a encounter with the Real, without turning it into a new symbolic order, and so without smuggling particularity back in? Badiou presents his politics as a pure politics and he is keen to argue that this politics has left behind the mediation of a Hegelian economy.[11] But can this convince? As if his maoist program is devoid of very particular preferences, as if a political system at all can be devoid of particular preferences? Purity as a kind of solidified state remains highly doubtful and we might do better, for the sake of good politics, not to think here in terms of purity. (The same might go for love also.)

A similar problem arises in the thought of his revolutionary friend, Slavoj Zizek. In a reaction to Bataille and a certain Bataillian interpretation of Lacan, he uses dialectics to overcome transgression, by distinguishing between particular and absolute transgression, the latter as the transgression of the transgression. This would lift us above the messiness of desire and open up the domain of love. But isn’t he going a little too quick here? Of course, one can try to transgress transgression itself, but does this really make a difference. Take a successful hedonist-transgressive manager who opts at the age 60 for a simple life in the mountains. Or take a Casanova who at the age of 40 suddenly opts for marriage. Is the choice for the simplicity or marriage here not finally just a more subtle move in the very same economy of desire. Now, I do not want to suggest that we are only slaves in an economy of lust, but my question is if the encounter with the Absolute or the Real can be consolidated (by founding a new symbolic order on this encounter), this then as an open-narrative, or as the order of love or of pure politics. Indeed, if one’s final aim consists of out-narrating an existing narrative (let’s take the capitalist narrative) such a consolidation might be crucial. But is this not an all too easy instrumentalization of the interruption? Is this not precisely an attempt to take the sting out of it, by presupposing that the interruption itself can be anchored within a counter-narrative? Anyway, this brings us back to Bataille (and the eventual necessity of an unsystematic approach).

IV. Postmodernity’s gnosticism

Just as Sartre, Badiou and Zizek, Bataille is fascinated by the idea of revolution. But contrary to them, he doesn’t expect that life will be truly different after the event of the revolution. Not unlike someone as Ernst Jünger, who was of major influence here, Bataille considers the essence of revolution and war not as something political, but as the possibility of a confrontation with an excluded extremity. “In the infinite horror of war man has access to the extreme point which terrifies him.”[12] Bataille thus turns to phenomena as war and eroticism because it presents him with the ‘representations’ of the impossible, of the unimaginable.

Of course, he knows that in some way he is very Hegelian here, that by trying to represent the unrepresentable, he succumbs to a project of mediation. But it is precisely this recognition which enables him to question Hegel, and this without again installing a beyond, and an absolute purity, in which one presupposes to be freed from the messiness of mediation. His strategy is thus to fight reason with its own weapons, to rise above project through project. And while inner experience is itself the opposite of action, of project, of knowledge, it is nevertheless led by discursive reason. “Reason alone has the power to undo its work, to hurl down what it has built up.”[13] This also explains for him the necessity of a mystical-poetical approach; and not poetry as a means to express the extreme limit, not to master it in a work of art, but as way of putting language at risk; to destabilize language in order to seduce us into the silence of non-knowledge.[14]

To abstractly propose two distinct principles would be too easy and would not work. As Denis Hollier, a scholar of French Studies, argues: “Dualism is not a dualist system but a will to dualism, a resistance to system and homogeneity.”[15] At the point where the duality holds only the place of a thesis, it has already become monism. “For to be true to its inspiration, dualism must remain imperfect, surprising, extravagant.” This demands that one with one’s whole existence works his way out of language, instead of abstractly assuming this has already happened. Badiou then might all too easily presuppose to be able to overcome the contamination of particularity and Hegelian mediation. As a result of this, his dualism risks to remain an abstract dualism, that finally turns out to be just another monism. His dualism risks to be not impossible enough, and therefore not possible as a dualism. Maybe we could say there is just not enough unhappy consciousness in Badiou. As in Hegel’s account of it, Bataille’s subject remains eternally split, condemned to a life of work, but always called to the sovereignty of spiritual life; unable to escape the particularity of language, and at the same time unable to realise the only thing which truly matters within particularity; eternally restless, as a tragic Sisyphus resisting homogeneity.
To conclude: is this promising as a (philosophical or theological) project? I’m not sure. Morally or politically, it’s not promising at all, I’m afraid. But I have the impression that Bataille’s impossible dualism, his struggle is the expression of a deep existential experience, and that his whole thought is an attempt to do justice to this. It even might be a crucial contemporary outline of a spiritual program, as a refusal to divinise the world and as readiness to face the worst. In this, he seems to be the heir of a longstanding tradition. As Hans Jonas has argued, there is close connection between nihilist existentialism and Gnosticism, for they seem to be rooted in a similar experience.[16] The Gnostic sees himself confronted with the indifference of the universe to human aspirations. “The starry sky now stared man in the face with the fixed glare of alien power and necessity.” “Gone is the cosmos with whose immanent logos my own can feel kinship, gone the order of the whole in which man has his place.” The gnostic still experiences the world as a cosmos, as an order, but the problem now resides precisely in its completeness: it’s understood as a strict system of law, alien to our spiritual call. The cosmos is no longer a home; values are left ontologically unsupported, and the self is thrown back upon itself. And just as in Bataille’ story, it is dread which marks the awakening of the inner self from the slumber or intoxication of the world.

Of course, the Gnostic tradition still operate with a clear metaphysical framework, but also then might the Gnostic God be not so different from Bataille’s empty place after the dead of God. “A transcendence withdrawn from any normative relation to the world is equal to a transcendence which has lost its effective force.”[17] The Gnostic God is a Deus Absconditus, a stranger to the world, not revealed or even indicated by the world. He is the unknowable in terms of any worldly analogies. In the work of Bataille, He only seems to have become more strange; strange till the point of dying, and to point where man takes his place as a stranger to the world, losing his head in a dark night. The problem of widening the gap between heaven and earth, between the sacred and the profane, might therefore not just be the result of developments within modern physical science, or late medieval theology, but it might be rooted in an experience which is at least just as old as Christianity itself. It up to us to decide where to go with it, but we might do well not to dismiss it too easily.

"die findigen Tiere merken es schon, daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind in der gedeuteten Welt"

Rainer Maria Rilke

Endnotes
[1] G. Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure,
[2] This quote is taken from a lettre from Bataille to Kojève. For the English translation, cf. The Bataille Reader, F. Botting & E. Wilson (ed.), Oxford, 1997, 296.
[3] This is for Bataille at once a criticism of Kojève’s atheism.
[4] Cf. G. Bataille, L’expérience intérieure, Paris, 2004, 119: « La vie va se perdre dans la mort, les fleuves dans la mer et le connu dans l’inconnu. La connaissance et l’accès de l’inconnu. Le non-sens est l’aboutissement de chaque sens possible. »
[5] Cf. G. Bataille, L’expérience intérieure, 129 : « L’action introduit le connu. […] Mais le désir, la poésie, le rire, font incessamment glisser la vie dans le sens contraire, allant du connu à l’inconnu. L’existence à la fin décèle la tache aveugle de l’entendement et s’y absorbe aussitôt tout entière. […] La poésie, le rire, l’extase ne sont pas les moyens d’autre chose. Dans le ‘système’, poésie, rire, extase ne sont rien. Hegel s’en débarasse à la hâte : il ne connaît de fin que savoir. Son immense fatigue se lie à mes yeux à l’horreur de la tache aveugle. »
[6] G.Bataille, The Bataille Reader, p. 74.
[7] G. Bataille, The Practice of Joy Before Death, in G. Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1996, p. 237. Cf. also, G. Bataille, The Sacred, The Practice of Joy Before Death, in G. Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1996, p. 241: “If one now wants to represent, with an initial clarity, the ‘grail’ obstinately pursued through successive, deceptive and cloudy depths, it is necessary to insist upon the fact that it could never have been a substantial reality; on the contrary, it was an element characterized by the impossibility of its enduring. The term privileged instant is the only one that, with a certain amount of accuracy, accounts for what can be encountered at random in the search.”
[8] Cf. M. De Kesel, A Sovereign’s Anatomy: The Antique in Bataille’s Modernity and its impact on his Political Thought, in … , p. 218; S. Zizek, The Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy, …
[9] For the critique of dualism, cf. for example Catherine Pickstock, The Univocalist Mode of Production, in C. Davis, J. Milbank & S. Zizek, Theology and the Political. The New Debate, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 315.
[10] A. Badiou. Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, p.5.
[11] Just as also Paul does without mediation. Cf. A. Badiou, p. 48.
[12] The Bataille Reader, 75.
[13] The Bataille Reader, 77.
[14] “If poetry expresses it, the extreme limit is distinct from it: to the point of not being poetic, for if poetry has it as an object, it doesn’t reach it. When the extreme limit is there, the means which serve to attain it are no longer there.” The Bataille Reader, p. 80.
[15] Cf. D. Hollier, The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille, in Yale French Studies 78 (1990) 124-139, 127. Cf. also the work of Simone Pétrement, who was a scholar of Gnosticism and with whose work Bataille himself was familiar: “If faudrait donc dire qu’il ya contradiction dans l’idée même de dualisme. Ou bien le dualisme est métaphysique, il est vraiment une doctrine des principes, de ce qui compose le tout, et alors il est un dualisme faible, tout près de tomber dans le monisme. Il y a des principes, mais non la dualité. Ou bien il est la croyance à quelque chose de séparé, à une dualité irréductible, à une distance infranchissable; mais alors il n’est pas une doctrine des principes. […] Le dualisme ne peut donc être un enseignement dogmatique, mais il exprime la pensée active, la critique de soi-même.” S. Pétrement, Le dualisme chez Platon, les Gnostiques et les Manichéens, Brionne: Gérard Montfort, 1947, p. 312-313.
[16] Cf. H. Jonas, Gnosticism, Nihilism and Existentialism, in H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, 320-340.
[17] H. Jonas, Gnosticism, Nihilism and Existentialism, p. 328.