Friday, January 16, 2009
Nietzsche and Counter-culture
I have been finishing up grad school applications and writing a paper on Nietzsche and War and thus have not been able to devout any time to this blog right now...but one thing I hope to talk about is the way experimenting with drugs could potentially involve exploring the many nooks and cranies of human experience, which is something Nietzsche praised (I understand, of course, how against drugs - even caffeine - that Nietzsche himself was)
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Something I wrote recently, the degree of fictionality undiscolosed.
The more awakened I am, the more I am subjected to insomnia or called to be wakeful, the more wakeful I continue to be and increase in being [wakeful], and experience, life, and history extend themselves forth for wakefulness, which is to say, ethical, enlightened, aware, engagement. The ego which harbors no fear of death, no monsters beneath the bed of philosophy, no Cartesian Evil Genius, is an ego without need of the natural solution of sleep, the dialectically necessary negative term of the movement of Aufhebung. The ego that is wakeful is no longer ego in that determinative, signifier or linguistic sense—we should call it rather “ethical-ego.” The wakeful being now delineates a conscious distance in depth that pierces through and plumbs the oblivion and Apollinian transformative power of sleep.
On acid, individual beings—whether formally constituted as pure matter, sound, art, practical or functionary constructions (chairs, cushions), or other living beings and/or people—come alive. They regain or perhaps attain for the first time, in a psychedelic interpellation of Being and beings, their being, which is to say: their alterity. Needless to say, acid opens a qualitatively other aesthetic dimension phenomenologically and therefore significantly (in a Levinasian sense). On acid, even as individual beings present themselves, in their alterity and otherness and presence, so do they come alive. They come alive with the pre-conscious power of dreams, the primordial presence of the Other, the diachronous synchronicity which is precisely Rosenzweig’s revelation breaking into [the totality of] history.
Everyone else is coming down—I’m coming up.
Acid reveals nihilism and the lucidity which denudes truth in war. The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy: the Socratist morality as self-sufficient totality inevitably descends through Western philosophy and history to nihilism (the great slave revolt in morals, the new life, the protraction of an inherently nihilistic morality and will)—and then—something new—or else—nothing
Levinas identifies primordially behind any phenomenological encounter, any narrative or context or relation involving a constructed and constant subject, a subjected subject, the face-to-face interpellative encounter with the other. To say “with the Other” with a capital “O” means to signify diachrony preceding synchronicity, a diachrony therefore dis-ruptive to [and in and from and with] and other to temporal totality.
In the acid trip, not only can the other human being attain to an ethical presence by being present to its given sign, as indeed would only be an openness of perspective, for this is the case in reality, not merely in the trip—instead the Other is somehow more present in its primordial, diachronous priority.
The terrifying loss of name—this tropical and traditionally symbolic development, usually dialectical, here quite literally occurring just antecedent to the climax of the interpellative encounter—the interpellation of the same to the other—and thereby precluding it. To lose one’s name, to lose the ability to be hailed, to be addressed ethically and subjectively in the vocative, is to be emptied and reduced and generalized to the level of “person,” as in second person singular—“second person singular” “second person plural”—number indifferently, formally noted with the totalizing gaze of all objective cognition which speaks of and totalizes “persons” rather than calling into question and into responsibility you or me or [insert vocative address / interpellation].
But to return to before this inter-ruption: on acid the alterity of Being tears through the totality of phenomenonal cognition and the totality of Being itself is broken through by beings, beings attending the givenness or facticity of their sign, of their being—thus the totalizing fabric of phenomenal representation comes about, thus the world is first thematized—at the level of sensibility or sensuous representation. But again, what is primordial and local and central here is the presence of the Other to the world, which in a very Schopenhauerian vein is its thematization—diachronously founded, synchronously experienced in the ever-enduring present. But cannot a knowledge of Being thus—cannot an ethics thus—cannot the vigilant insomnia of acid and the relation to beings in their alterity and presence, the presence of the interpellative and interpellatable vocative person, upset and dis-rupt and inter-rupt and simply rupture the totality of the same? The same as totality: representation, sensation, idea, etc. The same as the ever-diachronously-primordial interpellative encounter with the other, the foundation and true third term of all totality—and thereby precisely the idea of infinity, this beautiful and profound structural and essential insight of Levinas’.
Acid reveals human beings in their destitution. As the various people of the party come down, or stretch thin in their overstretched overexertion, the spreadedness of their wakeful being becoming unwakeful precisely by that quality of spreadedness as a mode of existence, of temporal execution of essence—they are revealed in the destitution of their present, the desert of the real, the world as lived and thus as lived through and climactically or rather anti-climactically experienced as past and done. Life as lack; life lived by utilitarians. And are not drug users—myself included, of course—ultimately, insofar as “drug users” and not “human beings,” somnambulist utilitarians, seeking pleasure as a mode of being—as a mode with many forms, and always already, as it were, in Kierkegaard’s despair of not-knowing oneself to be in despair? The despair of more drugs, new drugs—more life, more experience, new experiences, more sex and rock and roll, more alterity, more otherness, but all in despair because all related to as experience, as life and lived experience (Erlebnis), as totality or in-totality—because related to merely as experience, merely as the subjection and subjugation of the subject self-sufficient in its subjectivity or spontaneous and arbitrary egoistic freedom. This is the “existential” dilemma that arises in and from Heidegger’s Age of The World Picture, man recognizing himself as placed in the role or context as standard and measure and measuerer of being. More life experience cannot account for grounding; more of the same, more totalization into lived life cannot account for the other—always a primordially felt lack, a hollow resonating through and within and from out of every bone of totality, the existential problematic of freedom as a mode of existence.
It is interesting to experience, phenomenologically, as a subject inscribing his thought into a purely digitial re-presentation—for writing is language, but not necessarily ethics; language only always operates in the depth of the ethical dimension, albeit “typically” only at a very shallow level. It is interesting to experience the “come-down”—the return to normal perception, which is to say: the relocation (re-location) of beings within the totality of Being, a Being which is only Being insofar as it is World Picture and, precisely, totality. The temptation of nihilism—the seduction of Erlebnis and Anschauung, the nihilism of sleep and weariness: a cessation of wakefulness out of weakness, though of course a weakness inscribed and inherent and intrinsic, part and parcel of embodiment. The weariness of consciousness indefatigably and yet increasingly weariedly and sleepingly vigilantly wakeful. Yes, the temptation of more experience, more drug, new experience, different drug, variation, change, formal play in becoming—anything to distract consciousness from its wakeful putting of itself into question, its rigorous and wakeful response to the diachronous and yet synchronous interpellative demand of ethics and call to responsibility.
Serontonin—chemical subjection and subjectivity and subjugation. Also suspicion—the nihilism of resenntiment, of reactive and petty nihilism.
-heraclitean.wordpress.com
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