Heidegger, difference

'The order of Heidegger's thought is, however, regularly disoriented by an oblique movement which inscribes truth in the process of propriation. Although this process is as if magnetized by a valuation or an ineradicable preference for the proper-ty (propre), it all the more surely leads to this proper-ty's (propre) abyssal structure. In such a structure, which is a non-fundamental one, at once superficial and bottomless, still and always "flat," the proper-ty (propre) is literally sunk. Even as it is carried away of itself by its desire, it founders there in the waters of this its own desire, unencounterable - of itself. It passes into the other.' - Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles

Anyone who has had the misfortune lately of asking me what book I'm reading knows how I've been pouring over Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which are his lectures in 1927 on Being and Time. Throughout, as I'm now at the second part of the lectures which focus on time and temporality, I keep going back to this Derrida quote. Yes, yes, I can hear Reiman yelling at me, but Derrida has a way of bringing the smallest, evasive parts of Heidegger's complicated attempt at a fundamental ontology. Here, in his book on Nietzsche, Derrida hits at what, at least as I've found in Heidegger, is the (in)determinate nature of Da-sein. The way in which Da-sein is under all its ontic showing(s), bottomless yet determinably present underneath.

I've yet to do Heidegger's 'later work,' but even from Being and Time and his lectures, one has to wonder at the question of difference in fundamental ontology. Da-sein as being-in-the-world, presumably with other Da-sein(s). In Heidegger's attempt to abandon metaphysics, one has to ask the question of how there can be a fundamental being of humans without a metaphysics (Derrida targets this in his 'Note on a Note' essay in Margins). I need to read more Heidegger (which I'm delighted at the possibility of) before I can further comment, but I've been thinking about this in many Cure-listening nights wandering in East Jerusalem.

Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. Trans: Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Spinoza, Heidegger and Deleuze

Upon finishing Deleuze's book on Spinoza, I admit some defeat on my early reading of the book. Thus a few remarks.

It struck me, in my reading, that Deleuze was trying to draw Heidegger out of Spinoza. Not fully, but enough to distance Spinoza from strictly Cartesian projects. Deleuze certainly has a point that essentia and existentia are placed in parallel, where '[b]y virtue of the cause of itself, the existence of substance is involved in essence, so that essence is an absolutely infinite power of existing. Between essence and existence, then, there is only a distinction of reason, insofar as one distinguishes the thing affirmed from its affirmation' (67). As Deleuze states two pages before, in his commentary on Spinoza's treatment of "Essence," '[t]he attributes are so many forces of existence and acting, while essence is an absolutely infinite power of existing and acting' (65). Deleuze is correct, I think, to put a Heideggerian spin on this and to suggest that these work in tandem, but nonetheless Spinoza does maintain the Cartesian hierarchy between essentia and existentia. Deleuze points out, implicitly, a way in which Heidegger might be Spinozist when he notes that '[e]ach attribute "expresses" a certain essence' (51), in that attributes of a substance are recieved by a subject to further show the essence of that substance. The ways in which the substance is recieved though its attributes, its 'affirmation,' is in existence, by which its essence is recieved. But it is the essence that is shown in existence, stemming from Descartes, which is opposed to Heidegger's inversion of this in Sind und Zeit. To Spinoza's credit, while he does retain this Cartesian heirarchy, he does put essence and existence in tandem, where each relies on the other. Further, this is done without dialectics. To me, this one of the key points of interest in Spinoza, and where the Nietzschean reading is defended best. I read Deleuze with a bit of a smile, as much as I respect him and think he has a solid reading, he nonetheless reads a certain Heideggerian-Marxian edge into Spinoza (words like 'production,' in the way that Deleuze is writing about them, I don't see in Spinoza), and thus the reading might be a bit strong. Though, with the suggestion of 'becoming,' 'threshold' and 'possibility' as key to Spinoza's text, I do not think Deleuze is very far off, though one is maybe getting more Deleuze here than Spinoza.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans: Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988.

Spinoza, Deleuze and the question of difference

Since I last posted I've finished Derrida's Spurs/Eperons (which is amazing, I could barely sleep afterward) and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (which I loved as well, though I was puzzled at Kierkegaard's confrontation with ethics, wondering why he never strictly draws a line between ethics and morality, though his analysis of faith-as-limit in metaphysics is beautiful).

Though it may seem a divergence from the general investigations here, I would, we could say, differ from such a judgment, at least outright. Many ways in which we think are partner as well to a 'fascist operational schema' (if one dares to be so assertive), and thus deserve some attention. It may seem rambling incoherently, but I'd like to flush out various things in a general build up. I would, quite humbly, liken such an approach to Nietzsche's seemingly chaotic use of aporias, which build together for a general critique.

This time, the problem(s) of difference consumes much of my current reading. I've been mulling over the quote of Derrida's posted last time, and I think he's on to something; namely, we cannot do without what we denounce, we are often implicated in their crimes, we use their tools and work in a framework at least somewhat in common with those we denounce. The problem of difference is loud and clear in Spinoza's Ethics and his reflections on the all-encompassing nature of God, sameness/difference and presence. I have, in the past day or so, been moving through Gilles Deleuze's book on Spinoza, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Deleuze is always a curious character for me, as I admire him deeply, in the way that he is brushed off or passed over. His closeness, and many times complentary pursuits, to Foucault and Derrida, is well-noted, though often underappreciated (in my mind) and he's classed to a secondary position to the two of them, though I can't help but wondering on the influence he had on both Foucault and Derrida in their respective work (Foucault, to his credit, loved to drop Deleuze when he could, while Derrida does only sparingly).

As far I've read, Deleuze's book on Spinoza is further indicator of his brilliance. While he isn't of the sweeping gestures that Foucault was so talented in articulating nor the intimacy of Derrida, he has such a sharp eye that he canot be ignored. Deleuze is correct point out, in my mind, that Spinoza neglects the strictly 'negative,' but in 'the reproach that Hegl will make to Spinoza, that he ignored the negative and its power, lies the glory and innocence of Spinoza, his own discovery' (13). While one can say that Deleuze takes certain liberties with Spinoza (an introduction of Marx and Nietzsche), I think he is right on in this. Obviously, both Marx and Nietzsche have not been born yet, but the ways in which Spinoza concieves God-as-infinite and substance have a certain bearing on their similarities to the discourses of both Marx and Nietzsche. Much of structural determinism (the latest apostle named Slavoj Zizek) seeks to arrest time, to take control of movement and flucuation, to determine the truth(s) of a system that exists prior to time, positing a 'totality' that is supposed to be all-encompassing. Spinoza, and Deleuze seems so far in agreement, in my reading, rests slightly opposed to this deterministic view. There is a notion of gradient and threshold, of becoming and existence (granted, Spinoza maintains the Cartesian hierarchy that Heidegger will come to critique), gives Spinoza a bit of an edge of the Aristotelian determinism, as Spinoza sees God within everything, where God is infinite. There are certain problems, granted, with naming the infinite, of defining something which has so limit, but it also enables Spinoza to put his system up for flucuation, giving it a more liquid nature. Substance, and the greater knowledge thereof, found as coming closer to God, suggests a gradient of movement, but God being infinite and in all things, there is always a greater movement towards God and the full threshold is never reached. One sees elements of this in Foucault's discussions of power/resistance and Derrida's writings on the impossibilities of full deconstruction.

Spinoza also opens the question of difference and strays from dialectical determinations, instead examining multitudes of substance that are common, have sameness we could say, in their 'attributes' but possess difference in essence. As Deleuze notes, the 'attributes are distinct in reality: no attribute needs another, or anything pertaining to another, in order to be conceived. Hence they express substantial qualities that are absolutely simple' (51-52). While these are 'distinct in reality,' Spinoza places them in contingency, a relational infinity, that suggests some deference. Differance (accent on the a, I can't find it on my computer), perhaps. Spinoza's usage of contigency is, for me, one of the most notable things about the Ethics.

In the previous discussion of Foucault, we examined, albeit briefly, 'Panopticism,' which posits a similar 'infinity' conceived in a sphere of 'wholeness,' though this wholeness is impossible to strictly posit or name. Foucault complicates Spinoza's claim that attributes can be 'distinct' but Foucault's implicit emphasis on agents and agency (one needs a multitude of people to make the Panopticon work after all) retains a bit of this Spinozist framework.

Up to critique and possible misreading, but these have been points of interest recently.

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans: Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.

'Wherefore it is certain that those, who cry out the loudest against the misuse of honor and the vanity of the world, are those who most greedily covet it. This is not peculiar to the ambitious, but is common to all who are ill-used by fortune, and who are infirm in spirit. For a poor man also, who is miserly, will talk incessantly of the misuse of wealth and of the vices of the rich; whereby he merely torments himself, and shows the world that he is intolerant, not only of his own poverty, but also of other people's riches' - The Ethics, 260

This quote was given last time, but worth a re-quoting, a re-orientation to the top of this post. On first reading, this seems of a ferocity that would expect from Nietzsche and it seems but a bit out of place in Spinoza. But the power of his critique here cannot be underestimated, especially from where I am writing, and is due further critical attention. What is most praise-worthy, for this extended exercise and here as well, is the manner in which Spinoza comments on the angry, seething and internally violent nature of social interaction. Spinoza, here, in a manner reminscent of psychoanalysis, seems to be suggesting a racism that is underneath, a seething that hates others in engaging with one's own perceived shortcomings.

There are two ways, I think, of reading this passage: one from psychoanalysis, the other in Nietzsche. For the former, one could argue, the subject is always covering in fear of engaging with the Real, or the behaviors that are wrong, which the subject acts itself. The subject hates others who embody that which it embodies, to cover or avoid the Real of the traumatic realization of their own actions. I'm not thoroughly convinced by this reading, but it's a possibility and sheds some intereting views. A Nietzschean reading is interesting to, though it would be a jump (and a huge misreading) to say that Nietzsche and Spinoza are on the page about most things; Nietzsche mocks much of what Spinoza advocates (God, control, measure, a subject, etc.). But Spinoza, in this passage, seems to suggest as to the operative hatred in defining oneself, where the subject is caught in something reminiscent of Slave Morality. The subject loathes that which it perceives close it because it sees others in possession of that which it desires. The subject defines its morality based what benefits it and doesn't benefit it, without ever making an effort to examine its own internal hatred. There's something to be said about these similarities.

One other thing jumped at me in reading this passage, in that it reminded me of a passage from Derrida's book on Heidegger's relation to Nazism, Of Spirit. Derrida writes:

'Because one cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by reinscribing spirit in an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectivity, even if in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this program remains very strong, it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today and for a long time to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism, etc., and do this in the name of spirit, and even of the freedom of (the) spirit, in the name of an axomatic - for example, that of democracy or "human rights" - which, directly or not, comes back to the metaphysics of subjectivity' (40).

Read in connection with the Spinoza quote above, one notices that Spinoza renders the problem as caused by 'infirm spirit.' I'll leave that for now.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans: Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Spinoza, Benedict. The Ethics. Trans: R.H.M. Elwes. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1989.

Spinoza

Must of the recent time has been spent finishing Spinoza's 'Ethics' and moving through Derrida's 'Spurs,' but a quote from Spinoza which is due a great deal of attention:

'Wherefore it is certain that those, who cry out the loudest against the misuse of honor and the vanity of the world, are those who most greedily covet it. This is not peculiar to the ambitious, but is common to all who are ill-used by fortune, and who are infirm in spirit. For a poor man also, who is miserly, will talk incessantly of the misuse of wealth and of the vices of the rich; whereby he merely torments himself, and shows the world that he is intolerant, not only of his own poverty, but also of other people's riches' - The Ethics, 260

Much reflection on this to come.

Spinoza, Benedict. The Ethics. Trans: R.H.M. Elwes. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1989.

Prisons of the "Self," cont'd

'Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants.' - Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202

Of particular interest to me is the displacement in Foucault of the "subject," the manner(s) in which the self is broken down. If we assume, which I think Foucault is after, that we already live various Panopticons, to which determinations of our identity (or rather, identities) occur within these Panopticons, it is difficult to image how, with certainty, we could isolate that which is before social interaction and mediation. This is, perhaps, a bold and broad statement, but it appears to be what Foucault is suggesting. The link, for me, perhaps, between what is this "era" of Foucault and the "late Foucault" (a distinction to which I am not pleased with) appears to be the emphasis on the 'art(s) of living,' the ways in which life is performed, created and designed.

There is a tension here, and two 'conditions of impossibility': namely, if domination is solely performed by agents, should that/would that not defeat the Panopticon, where it's goal results in it's own demise? Rather, if agents perform their own subjection completely and the guard would disappear, rendering the whole system null? This is a difficult question, in fact, one should wonder if it is the first 'condition of impossibility' of the Panoptic model-as-society. But I think this problem can be addressed in this way: the job of the guard is to convince the prisoner that it is needed and that the direction(s) of the guard is necessary. If everyone is prisoner and guard at the same time, and such mitigation, production and formation is always occuring, this necessitates some, even the most minute, interaction with other agents. The second 'condition of impossibility' is the complete isolation of agents.

I make a distinction here between 'agent' and 'subject.' Though the Derridan critique would suggest, I would guess, that the utterance of 'agent' provides a presence to that which is supposed to be without any determinable presence. This I acknowledge. But here I draw the distinction as my answer: we can presume agents coding and acting with out any assertion of primary characteristics or a priori self-hood. Nietzsche stressed that the actor is 'fabricated' in the act (in the first treatise of the Genealogy, which, given most of my books in storage and in the US, I don't have at this time) and I share this view. Open to critique, these are interesting discussions to me.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans: Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995.

Panopticism, the performance of subjection, the prison of the 'Self'

I think it fit to begin such an exercise with Foucault's first principle of an ‘art of living [to] counter all forms of fascism’ in the introduction to Anti-Oedipus, where he calls for ‘Free political action from all unity and totalizing paranoia’ (xiii). No one but Foucault, with Nietzschean mistrust, so masterfully examined the violence of this 'paranoia' in its hidden forms so common to public discourse on governance: nationalism and national unity, punishment and 'protecting freedom,' and on and on. But Foucault was often keen to point out the presence of such coercion even in movements of resistance, which, for Foucault, possess their own internal coercive mechanisms, racisms and power relations. Such resistance is always defined with the sphere of a 'power network' or the broad regime of power relations; resistance in some ways, in the Foucauldian sense, justifies and recognizes that which it denounces, and can never be defined outside the codes it desires to banish.

It is thus useful to enter Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison into this discussion, which I consider to be Foucault's finest work. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault's target of critique is prisons, and, as the title suggests, the disciplining of bodies and behaviors, as well as the acts of punishment meant to reiterate that which is deemed "correct" or "good." But Foucault's project, though never explicitly stated, is highly suggestive of a different project than simply tracing the genealogy of prison development; Foucault is after a whole set of societal forms built on the prison. It is at the end of 'Panopticism,' which will be given more attention shortly, that Foucault asks: 'Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?' (228). Foucault's analysis of Bentham's Panopticon prison is an indictment of a society built on containment, punishment, guarding and restriction.

The specific drawing is worth looking up (Foucault provides a picture of the architecural drawing in the book, the drawing is also easy to find on the web), but the structure of Panopticon consists as such: a series of prison cells in a circle, with a guard tower at the center, to which the cells are back-lit, allowing the guard(s) to see every move of the prisoner, but the prisoners are unable to see the guard. The structure of the Panopticon makes a whole number of power relations possible, as the 'panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately,' where '[v]isibility is a trap' (200). It is through this exposure of the prisoners and the lack of exposure of the guard that the Panopticon is possible: 'this invisibility is a guarantee of order' (ibid).

Here Foucault names the 'major effect of the Panopticon' which is 'to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers' (201). Thus, and I apologize to the reader for such a long quotation, the prisoners are presented with a situation in which they must be their own guard, bound by the prison that they help build at every moment. While the structure of the prison itself matters, it is "always already" (to use Nietzsche's phrase) tied to it's receival by the inmates and the guards, employing the prisoners as the guards of their own personal prisons. Foucault writes such rather eloquently when he remarks that the Panopticon is 'polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons' (205).

Thus, power, or as Foucault defines it, "force relations," work in two different, but complementary ways: through direct coercion on bodies and through the performance of "subjects" under the threat of outside coercion, where those "subjects" continue to invent roles conducive to their imprisonment. While one could argue that the guard maintains the quality of a 'pure signifier,' I would stray from this, suggesting instead that the distinction between guard and prisoner breaks down; the goal of the Panopticon is to render the guard useless, instead working towards a pure performative imprisonment, or rather a behavioral schema built solely on maintaining the "individual subject's" role in the Panopticon, where the "subject" shapes itself around the possible gaze of the guard, which is in turn shifting and changing as well. The prisoner relations with this schema would, as well, extend between each other, establishing hierarchies, methods and organizational patterns around, and as further codes, these power relations, regulating each other. Such a positing of the guard-as-pure-signifier maintains the hierarchy that Foucault is so keen to break down: 'Consquently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants' (202).

Foucault, here, offers a decentered view of analysis of power, stripping it of a top-down nature and demonstrating how power can in fact work at the bottom. This is key, I will pick up here another time.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans: Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans: Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995.

A re-evaluation

Ironically, a clarification is needed on the last post of two clarifications. I possibly made the mistake of rendering historical forms of fascist politics, Fascism, as 'primarily ignored.' This was a misrepresentation of the project, as such a remark may seem against the original declaration of the project. I should not have phrased it this way. My aim, rather, is to attack the question of fascism with those historical forms in mind, and in historical analysis, but look, as well, at more abstract considerations of the mechanics of fascist politics, or how politics is/can be, in many ways, fascist. We are looking at the molecular, not the molar, as Deleuze and Guattari say.

Clarification of two terms

A few notes before any analysis can be made here, particular of two terms. Shrewd readers will notice I have used ‘Fascism’ and ‘fascism,’ to which one would first imagine was a misprint or error, and rightly so. Rather, I would counter, this is on purpose. Fascism, in these notes, will be primarily ignored; it is the name we give to historical occurrences so commonly analyzed, like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. The other term, fascism, is in consideration here, as the practice of a fascist politics or way of life. Foucault was clear on this in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia when he writes: ‘Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism…. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates us and exploits us’ (xiii).

Thus, there is a founded difference in consideration, here, between the ‘historical fascisms,’ or Fascism, and fascism, the processes, codes and acts that Foucault is after in his introduction. I believe this distinction has great barring on our discussion, to which I hope to show, with hopefully comments and help, which are welcome, of course. The investigation of fascism, here, is after, most modestly, what Foucault praises Deleuze and Guattari for, namely, ‘the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives’ (xiv).

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans: Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Introduction

Consider this in many ways a notebook, or various notebooks of mediations on fascism. We are all familiar, sometimes overly familiar, with a certain view of Fascism in its historical application, as ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘totalitarian politics,’ marked by mass murder and extermination, cults and rituals of state worship, as well as fear and unprecedented oversight by the governmental bodies of the people, who, in a moment of fallen weakness, shamelessly comply out of both apparent monstrosity and fear. The three most (in)famous figures are, of course, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, along with the dictators that mark the past century with campaigns of terror, fear and violence.

Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, in many ways, are the limits we set as the extremes of human behavior and possibility of brutality, they are in many ways other than us we say, they are situations gone too far astray, they are politics when taken away from the people, they are the ultimate compromising of our inherent democratic freedoms. Much time and energy has been spent working through these questions, not without some fruit. But the hard, difficult question is never asked, namely the question that ponders the mechanics of Fascism and where they are derived. The question sitting the corner of the room begs: yes, all that happened is horrible, but how do we resemble those monsters? Is there in fact a little monster in all of us, in our minds, in our thoughts, in our behaviors? Is this monster rather created by us in an effort to distance ourselves from a project all too reflective of what is deemed ‘rational’ or ‘right,’ where there is no real monster at all, but rather expressions in full form of what we believe to be true, good and progressive?

Asking these questions is by no means to demean the suffering of those who lived under Fascist regimes, but rather quite the opposite. I write these notes in Jerusalem, where the act of mourning those murdered by the Nazis, in all of the Nazi holocaust’s awful brutality and willingness, weighs heavily on the public conscious. The Nazi holocaust is continually on the mind of many here and subject to consistent interpretation, evaluation and remembrance. The purpose of these notes is to do a different act of mourning and remembrance for the victims of such atrocities, to ask the hard questions about our thoughts, questions about how such atrocities could ever occur. But instead of doing so in an attempt to report the horrors again or document how ‘freakish’ or ‘monstrous’ such crimes are, away from us and all rationality, instead the aim will be to wonder as to how such killers are, in many ways, more like us than we want to believe, and if they are executing what we believe to its fullest extent, if they are our project par excellence. Killing became part of everyday life under the Nazis. In these notes, everyday life is on trial.

These notes are dedicated to Hallie, for the bomb, and Chino Moreno, for the way home.