Against Culture

The identity of the same is an equivocation, a place without place. The "I am" is an assertion of allegiance before it attains any sort of meaningful substance, and this allegiance to the same name in the face of the other is the second term of meaning, the same/other dyad being exceeded by their connectivity, which erases their separate identity-- and resolves an irreducible separation by re-inscribing this self-difference already in the name of the Other.

Your name declares your genealogy, arrives as the for-what and for-whom you stand; your name stands for you, it already effaces your identification as any separate, autonomous being. A name is a confession to belonging, inclusion into a community of speakers, who at the least acknowledge your awareness. The name is the essence of symbolism. Thus the name presents us with a triple reflection towards/away from/towards the subject: my awareness of the others' consciousness of my presence already convokes the declaration of my name, albeit by the voice, or even the slightest movement of the others' hand, at last, merely her gaze accomplishes the same reflection which is sanctified, or rather purged of sanctity, in a name.

But the name only refers to the break within identity; it is the first material, or rather vocal illusion, which in hiding a deeper separation and mystery from itself, refers back to the ultimate illusion. This being the faith in appearances, images, letters, the religious illusion, if you like-- though this is confounded still more by cross-currents from the premodern, modern and postmodern re-crisises of faith-- but what all of this amounts to a sort of status quo, not progress but exactly a deadlock.

Faithlessness, whether in divinity, in institutions, in religions, in society, or in culture, is here to be read as that symptom of a heartbreaking disappointment, "yet another defective situation." It is a resistance-- to the other in whom trust is not to be placed, leaders who fail at their post and take us not into the promised safety but rather deeper into danger than we were before. The death of God is neither ontological nor religious--it occurs in the loss of faith in the Other, when we observe that justification and responsibility are no longer the criteria of political economy.

Or worse, they never could be: power is not fairly distributed, even so the distribution is irrational, "up for grabs," as it were; the world seems bent on continuing a destructive spiral of violence and war... Even though boredom is counter-revolutionary, it is not hard to see that apathy is intelligent psychological self-defence in the midst of this perfectly reasonable, terrifyingly irrational society we've become. Alienation, disillusionment, disconent--all this speaks to a mass abreaction, to a steadily quickening pace of Events, and to the failure of static institutions to adequately respond, to represent, to keep count, as it were.

The fact is that many if not most of the institutions we are supposed to have faith in have long been exposed as a sham, whose main accomplishment was accomplished at its founding--and it seems as though these institutions have continued existing as if in mourning for the ecstatic heyday of its inauguration. But reactionary behavior patterns, acting only insofar as a spectator, affirms the spectacle of the culture industry, interacting with others through an interference pattern of images.

Belonging to modern society is a non-participation, a relation without relation-- Our identities have only a derivative existence, mediated through the mass market, which was the historical moment in which the production of identical lives was made possible. So there is a sort of inevitable, irreducible gap within identity itself, not just in its relation with the Other; but there is another kind of break with time which currently prevails, a dangerous amnesia or alienation of identity from its own future, which with respect to the individual is equivalent to the void (uncounted) place of the individual in the prevailing political economy, his (social, legal, religious) position of powerlessness and weakness in the face of an absolutely transcendent Other.

This is why much of the discourse on 'respect for the other' is misguided, since it recognizes only an apologetic stance towards the approach of the other. But what if the other comes to me with war and hate in his heart? Should I both to attempt a face to face resolution? Or, rather, should I protect what is mine, protect myself from the machinations of his evil intent? The resistance towards the repressive other is also an unavoidable ethical stance. But a society without peace is a non-society, and mercy towards the other cannot exist without love.

Freedom is not merely our birthright; it must also be excerised, demanded, that is to say, we must produce freedom positively. Negative freedom is slavery; this is the weakness of the doctrines of 'tolerance'. They reflect only the powerlessness of the spectator, or rather the false choice of the spectator (what to watch, not whether to watch,) reducing the gap between cultures to the choice between, say, marlboro and camel lights-- it speaks of the disconnected, unsatisfied lack inherent in the cycle of addiction without truth or completion, in which it becomes easier to accept than challenge, and we resign ourselves as spectators of the tragic dramaturgy opened up by this radical separation, this inversion of life into non-life, and thereby we are convinced into giving away our birthright: finally, we accept the prevailing status quo, quite ready to defend our right to non-freedom at all costs.

Against culture, we must produce freedom constantly if we are to be free; not hectically, at though trying to catch up with it, as though it escaped our grasp: we produce freedom not by exerting our power, but our right to powerlessness-- that is, living without paranoia, without the need to grasp and conquer and destroy, without allergies to the differences of others, without this primitive, aggressive culture of dominance, acquistion and nihilism.

Freedom is the constant demand of this right, the right to peace, without which there can be no society at all. Else we are merely spectators, devourers of the perverse, apathetic images which mediate our entire existence-- without peace, there is only non-life, a closed life without life, as a defective, uncounted, exploited appendage of some incomprehnsibly colossal, terrifying war machine and its endlessly entertaining, fantastically profitable culture industry, which together invade, colonize and dominate our entire existence.

Thus freedom is a wager on peace, on the possibility (however slim) of a non-repressive society which lives and breathes freely, which has maturely accepted a limitation of its spontaneity. Culture as it currently exists is a spectacle of images which interpose and mediate our relation with the Other; it is anti-ethical. Thus culture is the socio-political surgery of separating Being into beings, infinity from itself, a reduction of the subject to the pure form of the void. We belong to a culture to the same degree we are de-formed by it--that is, how deeply we believe in its truth. The "truth" of such a violent, permissive culture is the moment in a falsehood in which it is expressed, for this culture will tell you whatever you want to hear, as long as you're paying up. Thus the political consequence of not resisting such a monological and destructive modality of culture is the revenge of the same violent logic of subtraction: the sudden reduction of every infinite multiplicity-- to the same empty image reproduced forever.

Anaximander and the Infinite

'The principle and beginning ... of beings is the limitless ... where beings have their beginning, therein also have their end according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the arrangement of time.

[The limitless is] immortal [...] and imperishable.'

ἀρχὴ ... τῶν ὄντων τὸ ἄπειρον ... ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι͵ καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν.

Ἀθάνατον [...] καὶ ἀνώλεθρον.

[Fragments of Anaximander]


The idea of the infinite is, perhaps, the oldest philosophical concept in the Western tradition, dating back to the earliest fragment of Anaximander. In the Physics, Aristotle credits Anaximander as the first to name the infinite as the material cause of all things and cites him as asserting that “the first element of things was the Infinite.” What is absolutely spine-tingling about this ascription of generative power to the idea of infinity is the deduction following it: since the other ‘elements’ oppose and balance one another, none of them can equal or surpass the infinite. Thus infinity is both the material cause of all things as well as their ultimate be-ing, since all the other elements which exist are finite, deriving their existence from infinity. And, since it is always within the ‘domain’ (as it were) of the infinite that “things take their rise” and “pass away once more, as is ordained,” these finite creatures, derivative of the infinite but separated from it by their antagonism for one another, must “make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the appointed time.”

From the very beginning of what we think of as philosophy, the infinite has been tied not only to that which floods and exceeds the bounds of all creation, both temporally and materially, but to a fundamental conception of justice and ethical principle. In the idea of the infinite the ethical relation is already asserted. The infinite is not just an illustration of the ethical relation, or the other way around; nor is it a mere similarity in ontological or metaphysical structure which is being played upon; the very transcendence embodied and overflowed in the idea of infinity already ordains respect, as from some ontological height so awesome as so to metaphysically sublime, demands that justice be "paid" or en-acted, not in some afterlife, but "according to necessity," within time itself. That is, justice is not some transcendent figure by which a cosmic judgment is placed; justice must be rendered by “reparation and satisfaction” towards one another within time, “according to the appointed time.” There is no truth without justice and there is no justice without the ethical relation. That is to say that love demands justice, there can be no conception of true justice without invoking an infinite love--that is, there is a radical pre-ontological priority of the relationship to the human face which is the origin of social justice.

The infinite is the meaning of an unencompassable height, radically transcending us, calling our freedom into question by its monstrous presence. This calling into question by that which is limitless, by that which is beyond-being, imperishable and immortal-- is already ethics, for justice is demanded by love, the relation to the other is already transfigured by an ethical relation, by the infinity which the coming of the other into my realm actualizes. The idea of infinity is a sun truly too bright for philosophy to bear without squinting at the truth. Nietzsche's reproach of the philosophers, that they approach it all too directly, is an appreciation of the enigma and wonder of infinity, as well as its (inevitable, we're human, right?) erotic dimension, as Nietzsche puts it: "Truth is like a woman." In other words, philosophers confound themselves with the paradoxes of infinty, whereas there is a completely rational integration with a properly conceived religious perspective. This "trick" is simply an appreciation of the out-of-bounds surplus which the idea of infinity embodies: transcendence, right? In other words, we are situated asymetrically relative to an Otherness which precedes and supercedes us ontologically and metaphysically; the only possible relation is one of submission, i.e., ethics, being a host, welcoming the other, etc. In sociality we are rewarded amply for such a "subjection" to the beyond. We can see the infinite in language. In short, there is a completely valid perspective which integrates (post)-religion and philosophy while retaining political and moral integrity: in other words, a proper conception of the infinite and of the other, that we are always situated in relation to an-other, and that this being another-to-myself constitutes awareness itself, and moreover, is already an ethical relation.

We are close to Hegel when tells us there could be religion without philosophy, but no philosophy without religion; the idea of infinity is not just the pure formal representation of 'endlessness,' but is a thought which overflows itself, already springs into action as of its own accord Even the idea of infinity radically phenomenologically exceeds ourselves: and isn't this Descartes discovery, where he discovers himself and the absolute simultaneously, as it were? But the temporality is actually reversed, for only once the absolutely infinite is glimpsed, must he squint and dilute the purity of the discovery by conceptualizing perfection or purity itself, purged of the violence of the sacred; he discovered the pinpoint self, the Cartesian subject.

Badiou rediscovers the infinite multiplicity at the core of being one-self, and concludes that the One is not (i.e., God is dead); in ontology, the radical encounter with the idea of the infinite is completely purged of the violence of the sacred. However, to reinstitute it, we don't need recourse to religious faith per se; we need to embard upon a re-understanding of religion, as (after Marx, of course) Badiou himself knows, having written a book about St Paul, not to mention he sometimes calls his project a "laicization" of the infinte, which implies an atheist re-interpretation of religious values. Indeed, he has been preceded on this point by Emmanuel Levinas, who also speaks of a "desacralization" of the world, so that ethics could truly take place (i.e., without the totalitarian structures which currently mediate our relation to the other.)

A proper reunderstanding of religion would recognize its function politically and psychologically. Such a revaluation would necessarily involve a reorganization of almost all the academic discourses, a radical re-territorialization of arbitrarily bifurcated and sutured disciplines (ways-of-speaking and ways-of-being.) Honestly, it is about time for another great revolution in even the major categories of human understanding and the way we organize reality. The time is ripe for a concise answer to our epochs' "life persistent questions," some kind of post-religious ethical value-system/life-style which happens to incorporate a convincing rational explanation for our presence and meaning in the universe.

I wonder....

Reality (Emptiness, Humor, Freedom)

We are all familiar with this comic turnabout in older cartoons: that absurd situation involving, usually, a rampant chase, or sometimes a backwards-treading showdown, which ends with the unfortunate victim running headlong (or deliberately pacing) into frightfully empty space. Suspended oblivious in mid-air off the edge of a cliff, the victim of this joke pantomimes the sprinter’s circular leg motions--and, of course, his forward velocity only stops once he has realized the ground is no longer beneath him, that is, gravity only actually “takes hold” in the moments following the ‘revelation’ wherein the character ‘real’-izes that it should have already taken hold of him.

Why is there humor in this moment? Because we recognize ourselves in it: immersed within a theme of universal separation, i.e., surrounded by "nothing," humor comprehends that the universe is not what we decide it is, but is always only what we real-ize it is. More generally, a joke “cures” us as a vaccine does, by reproducing the disease in an 'innocuous' form; in particular, the joke neuters a radical or contradictory situation, but by exemplifying the inconsistent and exaggerating it. There are at least three reasons for this. First, by impertinently giving voice straightforwardly to an a-sensical disjunction, we disarm the imminent threat of the contradiction, we "open up" a void in the world in order to distract ourselves from the actual void, but only for a time--even though by doing so, we ("inadvertently") introduce further tensions via themes and association, tearing open an infinite number of linked and novel inconsistencies. Which is why, secondly, jokes are a release of unconscious tension: by placing these contradictions into the ("logical") temporal sequence of events, we "master" and therefore obliviate time itself: humor owes its existence entirely to deliberate timing. Third, by encapsulating the paradox, we position the feared object strictly within the horizon of thought; but a joke always wants to say more than it says, and humor lives entirely in the gap between what is and what is said.

By reifying the glitch between language and being, the joke strikes us both as true and absurd simultaneously, and thus offers a glimpse beyond the horizon at an alternate reality, as enjoyment and effulgent feeling which is not a surprised knowing but is precisely laughter. Thus a joke is a narratively structured mis-leading which is just hypnotic enough to cause a momentary “hiccup” in our stream of reality, the improvised incorporation of an alien and unexpected rhythm. This moment is a break that mends us, a tearing open of a wound that heals us, if only for one instant, from the irreducible lack in this defective world, a makeshift vaccine simultaneously made for and from the inevitable brokenness of being (one-self).

Humor is this cure which reifies the terrifying eruption of naked existence itself. Although a humorous euphemism seems only to reiterate the 'feared' or 'broken' object in a clandestine and reconstituted shape, it is really a way of forgetting the thing itself, for within the bounds of this deliberate act of self-deception our abstract fear and tension dissipates, but not by being erased: rather, we express the tension all too directly, we magnify and externalize our unnameable fears, surround ourselves with it until it is colossal, all-consuming, cosmically terrifying, and then, of course, it can no longer hurt us because we realize it has become altogether too much, which is, of course, never enough. A joke is only really funny once. A stale joke reeks of the fears which caused it to be created as an armor piece in the very first place.

What is funny in this delayed falling, in the “hiccup” moment of the cartoon just after the unfortunate victim realizes there is no longer support beneath him? It is because the victim himself thereby brings about the very end he only suspects. We identify with the victim of the joke in this minimal terror of sudden foundationlessness. An unstatable fear because it echoes an ex-centered tension, or threat creeping in from beyond or outside the situation, and this fear which is precisely what-is-stated. Indeed, by stating our unstatable fear, this joke is giving voice to the “wavering” between language and reality which underlies our most strictly held beliefs, indeed, our 'real'-ity itself. A joke, whose superbly joyous and free existence depends almost entirely on its timing, reveals the uncertain temporality of existence itself. The delayed timing upon which this joke depends, the hesitation literalized in this mid-air suspension, reifies the everyday situation where our very fear and ignorance brings about the thing which causes us to be afraid. Perhaps because fear and tension make us distracted and thus vulnerable, allowing us insufficient attention towards ominous constellations of coincidences-- (who knows, perhaps the perverse tendency of dangerous but unlikely scenarios to occur at a rate so frequent it would seem to belie their statistical improbability rather reveals our own unconscious though “deliberate” hand in their occurrence, not only in the paranoid formation of nightmare-fantasy but in this precisely forgotten transference between the semi-bodied half-dreamworld and the all-too-real situation--) such “coincidences” indeed turn out to be anything but, since between our crippling fear and empowering anxiety, we are mired in a generative though aversive amnesia: we ourselves bring about the most feared, least favorable condition by our own hand even as we try to prevent it, because we try to prevent it.

An obsessively-feared ocurrence is so dark we cannot help but clarify it, so unthinkable we cannot stop imagining and re-realizing its occurrence. But it is the same fearful thing against which we would enthusiastically raise our entire being up unless the thing in itself did not already present our own desire so completely and positively that to contradict it would be already to contradict this moment of resistance itself, to contradict our own superimposition. Our existence is itself nothing; our position within reality is arbitrary, random, meaningless; but the sequence of events in a human life is anything but arbitrary, anything but random. Such a suspension in mid-air is the result of a deliberate forgetting, an act of doublethink: a moment is forgotten, but (not) consciously, for we remember to forget (to remember...) The “x” which was to be erased is rather just crossed out with another “x”--but such self-censorship is not yet futility, even though through the act of repression itself we give a priveleged place to the underlying unadulterated truth. Repression admits of multiple possible modalities of enjoyment even as it denies this possibility, and is an erasure of (alleged) "bad" through a violent un-forgetting of the "right" way to do things: a legal limit on infinity is already close to society's definition of 'sanity.'

Self-censorship is an internalization of an entire society into your own mind, and already an expression of loyalty and dependence upon the entire chain of social appearances; thus can we only coherently externalize our “unique” (i.e., apart from “society”) attitude towards life through irreverence and disobedience towards society itself? “Breaking the rules” reformulates the exact structure of repression, though in reverse ("Now, I will impose MY reality upon YOU!") and thus fails completely to liberate: rebellion and discontent and chaos is not the same as completely liberated and uncensored desire-- which means "organized resistance" is already an irony and a contradiction--resistance, ultimately, is banal, about the every day situation, our allotment of time, and what we DO with it--and so "organization" already re-expresses the very repression which justice demands we resist. The problem, of course, is that of replacement: what do we do now that the old organization is out of the way? As Lacan remarks apropos of the events of May 1968, those who look for new masters will surely find them. The question is entirely one of the correct expression of master morality, which is a difficult and obscure question with troubling dimensions. But resistance in slavery is the alternative, and moreover is ludicrous, since we deny and affirm the same state of affairs simultaneously. For between freedom and repression there is a gap, and it is only in between that events take place-- in our following, we cannot move to either side without already becoming both part of the happening and irreversibly excised from it. Thus we are forever completely caught up within the "real" situation, without being able or willing to extricate ourselves--and, we are also wholly engrossed with the situation as an obstacle to be overcome: we prevent ourselves from passing beyond or through by the very fantasy that we are at a crossroads and that we are supposed, somehow, to “choose correctly” (even though we may be in “anguish”) and “move along” as though we could terminate eternally all relation we ever had to this event. But we are afraid to say “yes” and afraid to say “no,” and the truth is that it is only when we are unrecoverably stuck in this gap between absolute planes of existence, we actually have a choice.

Only in this gap between the “so-called” choice, which is so axiomatic, simplistic and pure as to be almost meaningless, do we ever exercise any sort of potentiality which could actually be called a freedom. But this freedom is always and only a freedom to perform a repressed act--(perform what?)--the act of demonstrating the existence of freedom, that is to say, an implication, the presentation of the possibility of a violation, the presentation merely of the possibility of such a performance, though it may ultimately be absurd in the cosmic sense. The possibility of something different than the ways things are, in different way than we are used to considering, is worth something: indeed, it’s worth everything, it’s the underlying rhythm of every joke, and the message of every joke is sympomatic of a pre-existing censorship which declares in almighty absolutes the limits of possibility. Thus humor is a teasing of the limits of the virtual. For example, art is always created in response to a repression, and expresses as always only an enduring, resistant, immanent freedom itself, in defiance of the censor: art is an asymptotic transference (i.e., an emancipatory event, an event at the ‘boundary’ of infinity.)

We are to be free in order to show others that there is repression-- we recognize in the delayed timing of the fall the true reality beneath appearances, that is, that we willingly suspend ourselves in mid-air, in universal doubt and hopelessness, in subjective anxiety and existential straits and spiritual hardship, in thoughtlessness and boredom and hesitation-- not in an attempt to change the ultimate outcome (which is, in any case, known completely in advance,) but simply to escape ourselves--

As in all jokes we learn from these cartoons a truth about freedom, which is only funny because it doesn't help--we already know that we cannot become free just by running away, whether from repression or from the object being repressed. The revelation is incarceration: we're only trapped when we realize we're trapped, left only to perform our meaningless dance in that unnameable intersection between the void and the law (violence/death/universality.) It is not obvious this "metaphysical" situation is not an academic question, or that an agnostic position over this kind of freedom is a contradiction, already choicelessness and pure nihilism, e.g., "supposing such choices are only theoretical, how can they make a universal difference?" It is important that the repressed memory here is humor itself, or more generally, the positivity of the void: running away won’t make us free, because the very force of the desire to escape the threat causes the unwanted event to come about. Pure escape is a paranoid fantasy just as absolute knowledge is a generic paranoid pretension. The difficulty here is that paranoid certainty verges on reality with a cryptic and surreal twist: we are indeed trapped. But then the question for freedom can therefore never be one of pure escape. Rather it is always particularly framed as the problematic of absolute separation, the difficult practical questions of pure revolt, the invocation of thought upon an eminently logical rebellion, a rigorous, a priori militant resistance to injustice. Freedom must be therefore be expressed as simultaneously particular, universal, and transcendending the universal: as resistance in the name of truth, as intolerance in the name of justice, and as courage in the face of annihilation----

Bergson (Attention)

"Collecting, organizing the totality of its experience in what we call its character, the mind causes it to converge upon actions in which we shall afterwards find, together with the action which is their matter, the unforeseen form which is stamped upon them by personality; but the action is not able to become real unless it succeeds in encasing itself in the actual situation, that is to say, in that particular assemblage of circumstances which is due to the particular position of the body in time and space... Our body, with the sensations which it recieves on the one hand and he movements which it is capable of executing on the other hand, is then, that which fixes our mind, and gives it balance and poise. The activity of the mind goes far beyond the mass of accumulated memories, as this mass of memories itself is infinitely more than the sensations and movements of the present hour; but these sensations and these movements condition what we may call our attention to life, and that is why everything depends on their cohesion in the normal work of the mind, as in a pyramid which should stand on its apex."
(Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory 172-3)

Why does the nervous system, like human societies and organizations, seems to beg for analysis and comprehension through the lens or cipher of a pyramidal geometry? The focal point of Bergson's hierarchical schema of consciousness is focus itself, that is, attention or awareness; we have here a series of superimposed triangles (after Lacan's schema) whose pinpoint alternates between polarized modalities: first, the ocular apparatus (itself a double tripartite structure whose apex is the surface of the cornea, with the visual field on one side and the inverted reflection on the other); then, sensation: the body's inter-face with externality, the focal point again being focus itself; then, the spiritual-social: the subject's inter-transposition with the void and the face on either side, an infinite and unterritorializable relation which cuts jagged gashes across and through the "stuff" and matter of subjectivity.

Indeed, Bergson is absolutely correct--everything depends on the cohesion of these jagged, irregular, mobile structures; their tripartite division (mind, body, soul; idea, image, word; object, eye, gaze) expresses the radical separation between any two layers within any structure, which reveals the radical interconnection between structures of awareness. Balance is inevitable, constantly resurging, self-correcting. We deconstruct the layers of awareness (physical, sensible, spiritual) only to discover their essential identity and contradiction in the same movement; it is this very rupture which is objectified in the cogito; this objectification is of course its downfall, as in fact it makes a much stronger case when inverted: we think because we are-- i.e., pure materialism-- but either way, the identity asserted between mind and body represses the fundamental rupture, the void point between or across both which awareness represents. But why does Bergson stand the pyramid upon its point?

The inversion which Bergson here intends is not between our body and its movements, nor between mind (thought, theory, memory, time) versus body (sensation, matter, movement, space); rather, there is a fundamental paradigm of balance and "poise" under which any awareness "decodes" itself through (e)motion, allows a crack in being so that its essence or "charater" may be exposed, and this rupture is rather the empty core of that helix around which body and mind are braided together--that is, the world is neither a stage upon which awareness and expression are performed are performed any more than awareness can give itself means, substance or inspiration to function.

By connecting awareness to balance, to the apex of an inverted pyramid, does Bergson not represent the weight, the burden of existence upon the singular "point" of the subject whose iceberg of unconsciousness is rather bearing down on his conscious attention rather than supporting? Our awareness is white hot and right here--is it not every engaged in an endless dissolution and triage of the mass of memories--which is itself a dissolution, displacement and metaphor for the mass of movements and sensations? Awareness is not thrown, but surges up from beneath a weight, constituted from the very courage to stand, as well as the steadiness to continue.

Yet, this balance is something like a logical rupture between "bodies" as independent, isolated, separate and mentally supervised "movement" as relationity, synchronicity interconnection. Poise is a kind of improvised synchronization with externality, as between "mind" as memories and "body" as pure sensation. This balance is not a solution; rather it is more like the generations, successive improvisations on similar themes; the uneasy balance of the family is structural (and is this still not the most repressed of Freud's discoveries?) but constantly seeking cohesion of disparate personalities, both antagonism and resolution.

Therefore the balance of Bergson's pyramid is as precarious as our attention span, for it is both (a) pure presentation and cautiously maintained, and (b) chronically absent and desperately sought after. Love, faith, understanding: are these are really enough to pacify and balance memory, to sanctify the present assembly, and transform emptiness into holiness? I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes"--if only for the briefest of moments...

Levinas

Levinas addresses a question (or criticism) very similar to Badiou’s in his essay God and Philosophy (published in 1975, the ideas put forth were already put forth in different forms in lectures given from 1973-4). In these writings we find Levinas considering the tenability of the inclusion of God within philosophical discourse. It would seem that as soon as we conceptualize God’s existence, we must also situate God amidst existence, somehow mysteriously within being’s movement. But yet, “in the most unlikely way,” God signifies “the beyond being, transcendence.” (G&P 1, all future quotes ibid.)

Thus, Levinas question is whether we can meaningfully express transcendence: can we “thematize” this radical excess of God’s being, or does transcendence delimit sensibility as such? He implies that part of the meaning of the ontological “height” of God’s existence is the exclusion of the possibility of an automatically meaningful self-revelation of being:

“Does not the modality which this adverb [“height”], borrowed from the dimension of the sky over our heads, expresses modify the verbal meaning of the verb ‘to be’ to the point of excluding it from the thinkable as something inapprehendable, excluding it from the esse showing itself, that is, showing itself meaningfully in a theme?” -God and Philosophy

In other words, since the very conception of God is that of the entity par excellence, the manner of God’s being exceeds the thinkable: God is ontologically out of bounds. Levinas' next move here is worth following closely. He recognizes as a “major tradition of philosophical rationalism” the claim that “the God of the Bible does not have meaning, that is, is not properly speaking thinkable.” He cites Mademoiselle Delhomme: ‘The concept of God is not a problematical concept; it is not a concept at all.’ This, of course, is a very Badiouian sentiment, insofar as it radically separates any conception of God from the philosophical discourse, as inherently and unconditionally irrational.

On the contrary, Levinas argues, without the concept of God we would not have thinking, let alone rationality: this radical ontological surplus we find in the transcendence of God is “among the concepts without which there would be no thought.” But the question still remains of the meaning of the word ‘God’ in the debate. After all, the radical belief implied in religious sentiment still seems to place an almost fascist restriction on critical thought. But, according to Levinas, God exceeds infinitely any possible curtailment of meaning. Indeed, meaning originally founds and manifests itself through a transcendent movement which is the very beginning of signification itself.

Thus Levinas’ aims to determine whether the meaning “first broached in presence,” the meaning which is equivalent to the esse of being, is already a restriction of meaning, “already a derivative or a drifting of meaning.” Levinas harbors an intuition that beyond the intelligibility of immanence (the “rationalism of identity, consciousness, the present, and being,”) that the “signifyingness” of transcendence can be and is understood, and (in a sense) is understanding itself. Transcendence is both “rationality” and “rationalism”, for it precedes and structures both. Indeed, this temporal precedence is critical to Levinas’ understanding of transcendence as a meaning which has priority “over and beyond being,” whose translation into ontological language Levinas names as the “antecedent” to being. In other words, we can still meaningfully speak ontologically of a transcendent being, and we are not necessarily lapsing into blind faith or wild opinion the moment we go beyond rational “terms and beings”:

“In fact, in staying or wanting to be outside of reason, faith and opinion speak the language of being. Nothing is less opposed to ontology than opinion and faith. To ask, as we are trying to do here, if God can be expressed in a rational discourse which would be neither ontology nor faith is implicitly to doubt the formal opposition...between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, invoked in faith without philosophy, and the god of the philosophers. It is to doubt that this opposition [between the God of Abraham and the god of philosophy] constitutes an alternative.”

This unnecessary alternative has led to a foundational crisis for modern ontology: what has still “not yet reached the threshold of intelligibility” (transcendence) is identical to what appears in the Bible as that which is above and beyond all possible comprehension. Ontology is not necessarily atheistic; in fact, opinion and faith must belong to ontology, if only because they are things that are. Less tautologically, if faith “speaks the language of being” in wanting to stay outside of reason, it must be because being is manifest in opinion and faith: in authentic belief, being is given a voice, a theme, by that ingenious and overflowing thought (the idea of infinity) which, out of rationality, aims at the outside and limit-point of reason.

Thus the very suggestion can only be justified retroactively through an original archaeo-ontological discovery: we can recover a “meaning equivalent to essence” only through the potential of “going back from this allegedly conditioned meaning to a meaning which could no longer be put in terms of being or in terms of beings.” The meaning which is an equivalent to the essence of being cannot be put in terms of many (beings) or one (being); the truth, as for Plato, is suspended in the void between the universal on the one hand and particulars on the other. Meaning is expressed in the participation between the multiple and the singular, enacted in the relationality of existence and existents.

Fantasy and Illumination

Have we been led into darkness by honeyed words of light and universal acceptance? Are we so entranced by this spectacle of violent love, so subdued by the pure flow of nothing, that when we are left trembling fear before the void--- we no longer know which way to turn? The truth ultimately is that unconsciously we know already we will eventually turn back, that at some point we always betray the unique truth of our discovery, by the very act of its dissemination.

We lose our faith at the very moment we gain the full force of it, in the very act of expressing it. This is the deep reason poets lie: like religion, love is a story, the prototype of the pure narrative, a total and complete fiction and yet, love owes its existence solely to the strictness of our belief.

Likewise, the religious fantasy is claimed to be formally real: whereas and therefore, the responsibility lies entirely upon us for the spontaneous generation of the radical movement of faith. As we are at once subjects of the truth we seek and subjected to this truth, we are absolutely irreplacable and we are thus made innocent of the slightest skepticism of our place in existence.

By allowing ourselves to be made incapable of maintaining even a minimal distance from the "unadulterated truth", to our ruin and to that of the truth itself, we have by now occupied a meta-position outside of self and universe in order to more completely vaingloriously identify with this universal, to become its excess, to exceed this universal in a particular trajectory. We have gone even beyond essence in our presumption that the universal could be given voice.

Indeed, this identification is already death to a separated freedom; the desire to reunite our essence with the universal is against life itself, is the very force of being-towards-death.

Even as we attempt to regain our balance, to recount and give voice to the pure truth, we are actors in a pure surrealistic fantasy of radical lack, speakers of a negativist discourse whose focus is death, non-existence, which thus becomes the rupture around which our "defective" mortal existence radiates-- and thus, in earning the right to speak it, we murder the truth itself!