LEZAMIANS (FROM OPPIANO LICÁRIO)
Every object in the house seemed magnetized and digested by the continuous flow of time that flowed through it. They maintained a kind of inherited friendship with their inhabitants; even the most recent objects hung like fruits of a family tree. Nothing seemed to claim its arrogance as a fragment; everything followed and supported each other like the plates of a Leyden jar. The Arabic ceramic plates, the Viennese Rococo cupids, the Eritrean divinities, the microfilm projection devices, the small fans of the Havana engravers, the umbrella left to dry in the patio, the young mestizo in uniform who danced with the small tray of coffee, did not delay in time or crouch in space; they formed the visible cavalcade of the temporal continuum. A hum, a river, the instantaneousness of arm movements. Indivisible time traversed by the movement of bodies, with the fatality of a paradoxical horizontal fall... The secret gravitation, not of the falling Icarus, but of the motionless pilgrim in the Eleatic space. But that incessantly subdivided space was traversed in its entirety by the traveling parabola of its inhabitants. Licario and Ynaca had been incessant travelers with incessant returns to insularity. They traveled and opened their suitcases like a fertilizing rain on the house. They had to return to overcome dispersion; when on their travels they felt an arm weighing too heavily, as if wanting to follow an individual adventure, they felt the need to return to umbilicalize again, to find the totality of health. Licario, Ynaca whispered to him one day, said he was traveling to get sick, but that he was returning to save himself, to increase the chance of meeting you, to be able to live in the image. Cemí thought Ynaca had said that phrase to flatter him, but it was actually one of the few times that flattery can clarify a destiny.
Post script
ResponderExcluirText wrote by me in 2017 in my blog ABSOLUTE ERSCHEINUNG
Excluirhttps://absoluteerscheinung.blogspot.com/2017/04/sentimento-da-situacao.html
SENSE OF THE SITUATION.
ResponderExcluirWhat is the world for us? It's certainly not an abstract scientific concept ----- my criterion has always been to first find the objects for my thought throughout each of my days. And in "everyday life," my world is my activity (in this case, intellectual), as well as my obligations and the tools that serve me in my most active hours, as well as my habits and vices. Many of the classical distinctions of philosophy disappear in the world as I see it. I've never been interested in separating my thoughts from the things of the "real world." In fact, my thoughts (like yours) only function "within" our respective worlds ----- one of the greatest problems of classical philosophy was distinguishing the "mental image" from the "concrete object." Another characteristic of my world is its proximity to the world of Martin Heidegger and "Dasein." The world has me as its reference, and it is me who gives it meaning. This means: for every object, for every event that exists in my world, the simple fact that it HAPPENS in my world gives it a characteristic of "BEING AVAILABLE", "BEING AT HAND FOR...".
Because if Heidegger's world was also the same world in which I now move every day, everything within it will necessarily appear to me through its FUNCTION or UTILITY. When we affirm that this world is essentially "close" to Dasein, that its characteristic is to DIS-DISTANCE the things in front of us, we are simply reaffirming this character of AVAILABILITY of the beings that appear in Heidegger's world. It is necessary to avoid any and all ideas of "SPATIAL RELATIONSHIP" in relation to this concept of PROXIMITY. What Heidegger says is quite clear: if I have the capacity to recognize something, it is because that thing performs some function for me. The idea of REACH implied in this conception of NEAR applies even to spatial distances in the vulgar sense: the house at the end of the road may be "spatially" far from us, but since we know where it is, it is AVAILABLE FOR... eventually, for us to reach it. Heidegger's analysis is quite sensible, and its sensibility hides something very serious. A doubt that can be formulated in the following way: if the world is, truly, the way Heidegger describes it, then why have we remained stuck for so long in current conceptions???
ResponderExcluirResponding to such an objection is not easy, since an answer would implicitly contain the entire mechanism of creation that led Heidegger to develop his ideas. But a partial satisfaction can be offered through the analysis of THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD. According to Heidegger, the LACK OF SOMETHING AVAILABLE, WHOSE EVERYDAY PRESENCE BEFORE US WAS IN ITSELF SO COMPREHENSIBLE THAT WE WERE NOT EVEN AWARE OF IT, is a "rupture of the networks of reference discovered by our surrounding gaze." This gaze stumbles upon the void, and now sees for the first time FOR WHAT and WITH WHAT "was available" what is now "lacking." And once again the surrounding world is announced. What thus appears is not an "available being," much less something "before the eyes" within which the available tool finds meaning. What appears is in the "there" before any and all observation. What appears is indeed inaccessible to the surrounding gaze, since this is always directed toward beings, but it is already, in each case, OPEN TO THE AROUND LOOK.
ResponderExcluirThe trivial and amorphous time of every day, this is where I live, this is where it accumulates; "there" is like knowing another time, the time of silent music and its telepathic scores, whose end is already present in its beginning: Eternity. But here it is as if I were immersed in a merciless romance that never ends, living all this with the indolent and indefinite time, abundant and pasty, full of small, concealed collapses that are my time here; and it seems to me that I have not been treating all these exceptional poetic goods with due attention----my only way of treating them was absence and Nothingness, interspersed with rare and dazzling presences. As if this absence in relation to everything were part of the normal human condition.
ExcluirThe being of the "second" Heidegger is a kind of illumination of language; not of scientific language, which constitutes reality to take advantage of it, but a being that inhabits poetic and creative language, in which it can be commemorated, that is, remembered together, so as not to fall into oblivion. Being is not presented as any entity, nor the principle of entities, nor the ground of reality. Nor is it something ineffable, for it is what makes language possible, being responsible for human speech about things. Not being any entity, nor the principle of entities, being, in a certain way, identifies itself with nothingness, but despite this, it exists. Being is a mystery, in the sense that it cannot be understood through any entity. Essential thinking would be the thinking that "plays" with being and reflects on it, simultaneously making it emerge.
ExcluirWe'll give this fever another name.
ExcluirWe'll give this fever another name, or as American poet Amy Clampitt would say:
to realign
the warp of history by
more than a snippet, or
forestall, when the wailing
stops, the looming torpor ----
except from, just possibly,
inside the fragile
ambush of being funny.
Nirvana is neither a place nor an effect, nor is it in time, nor is it attainable by any means; but it "is" and can be "seen." The "means" actually resorted to are not in themselves means toward Nirvana, but rather means for the elimination of everything that obscures the "vision" of Nirvana: just as when a lamp is brought into a dark room, one sees what is already there.
ExcluirGotama, the Buddha
ANANDA KENTISH COOMARASWAMY
Heidegger is showing here how, in order to perceive the structuring of our everyday world as a network of tools, this network must undergo a rupture. We become aware of the world when its structure is ruptured. If I happen to need to hang a picture on the wall, and the hammer is missing, I will immediately try to find something to replace it. That is, I observe the beings around me, searching for something capable of fulfilling the hammer's FOR AND WITH WHAT, perhaps some weight that will help me sink the nail into the wall. The structure of the world reveals itself to us through its rupture. But it doesn't stop there; Heidegger's continuation is, at first glance, enigmatic. Something was "revealed" with this rupture of the "networks of use." Let's say the hammer wasn't lost, but rather broken in our hands. The hammer was something available to perform a certain function, and in this function lay its meaning. Suddenly the handle breaks, and none of the pieces left in my hand can hammer in the nail I wanted.
ResponderExcluirAnd from the hammer, from the defined thing I had, I am reduced to having in my hands raw material, without purpose or destination. What appears is the UNFOUNDEDNESS of the NETWORK OF UTENSILS. The meaning, the use value existed within the network; outside of it, there is the question we ask: WHY THIS RAW MATTER???, WHAT FOR THIS, WHICH NO LONGER HAS ANY FUNCTION????, NO MEANING???? ----, what is very important, at this moment, is to understand how the question is asked. It is not asked abstractly, within a comfortable distance from things. It does not even need to be formulated in words. WE FEEL the question, that we LIVE it, for one or two seconds, in our totality, the question. Heidegger explains this experience of the question (which is immediately followed by a return to normality) through a concept which we referred to before, and whose full extension we can explore now. It is the FEELING OF THE SITUATION.
ResponderExcluirAt least this is the most understandable translation I know for the word used by Heidegger: BEFINDLICHKEIT ----- to feel, but the wordplay doesn't stop there. Verb derived from another, FINDEN ----- to find. When the structure of the complex instrument breaks before me, I FIND MYSELF BEFORE THE WORLD, I LOCATE MYSELF. And ME is not just a reflection here; this pronoun is indicating MY BEING REVEALED IN ITS FUNDAMENTAL SITUATION, as THROWN INTO A WORLD THAT HAS MOMENTARILY LOST ITS MEANING. We justify HERE the SITUATION of the FEELING OF SITUATION. The feeling is indicating our way of asking, ''basically in emotional terms''. But how???, because if we have become accustomed to understanding emotions as ''inferior modes of our behavior, opposing reason considered as a ''superior'' mode???
ResponderExcluirPost script
ResponderExcluirDear Mr. Einhauser!
It is with pleasure that I respond to your request and offer my assessment of what follows. Honigswald comes from the school of Neo-Kantianism, which defended a philosophy that was situated under the guise of liberalism. The essence of man was dissolved there into a consciousness in free suspension, and this, ultimately, was diluted into a logical and universal global reason. Along the way, under the guise of a more rigorously philosophical and scientific foundation, he ended up deviating from the vision of man in his historical roots and his tradition stemming from the people, from blood, and from the soil. This was accompanied by a deliberate repression of all metaphysical questioning, and man would only be valuable, from then on, as a servant of an indifferent and universal global culture. It is from this fundamental position that Honigswald's writings and, visibly, all of his teaching activity emanate. And it must be added that it is precisely he who fights for the thought of neo-Kantianism as a particularly dangerous subtlety and a dialectic that revolves in the void............
.............The danger lies, above all, in the fact that this agitation creates the impression of greater objectivity and more rigorous knowledge, and that it has already deceived and misled numerous young people. I still consider this man's appointment to the University of Munich a scandal, which can only be explained by the fact that the Catholic system favors such people, who are apparently indifferent to the worldview, because they pose no risk to authentic endeavors, and who are, in the well-known sense, "objectivist liberals." HEIL HITLER!
ExcluirYour devoted Heidegger
Reading this report on Honigswald, one better understands Heidegger's intention when, both at the end of his Kassel lectures and in paragraph 77 of Being and Time, he quoted Count Yorck's phrase that "modern man," that is, "man since the Renaissance, deserves to be buried." In the report in which H. denounces Honigswald, logical and universal reason is presented as a threat to the essence of man. On the other hand, the letter also reveals Heidegger's tendency toward denunciation, directed against a colleague whose position he covets. Heidegger's report has consequences, as Honigswald is expelled from the University of Munich. And when Heidegger realizes that the Munich professorship is vacant, he considers it the perfect time to be appointed, since in Munich he will be closer to Hitler.
ExcluirAs for the use of the word "Verjudung," it's the worst antisemitism you can find. A perfect replica of Hitler's speech, the first part of which in Mein Kampf speaks of "universities used by Jews" (verjudeten Universitaten).
Thus, in Heidegger, by conceiving of being as form and objective presence, we end up rendering becoming and history, that is, the historical existence of humankind, impossible. To safeguard the historicity of existence—this is Heidegger's thesis—being should not be understood as that which is common to all beings, but as the difference of all beings. As the difference of beings, Heidegger precisely calls the difference between being and beings "ontological difference"—being is the other of beings, that is, non-beings, and in this sense, it is nothingness, but not as nihil absolutum (absolute nothingness) but rather as "transcendence" in relation to beings.
ResponderExcluirContinue in one minute
ExcluirHeidegger clarifies as clearly as possible that the existence of humankind as a being capable of deciding about itself and choosing itself is only possible through an understanding of being. This understanding of being is a transport beyond beings, opening the free playing field of being where beings become evident and where humankind's existence can project and be a historical existence in the making.
ResponderExcluirThus, the thought of identity places being in an immediate relationship with consciousness. This is how presence degrades, transforming itself into an object that language apprehends.
With respect to this horizon, thought still runs the risk of becoming entangled in the mesh of inherited knowledge and lying and malicious recodings that nullify the ineffable and the distinctive that each human being bears. Risk that thought is nothing more than an obedient reflection of the belief systems of the societies in which it is constituted. This man's way of proceeding alienates him from his condition as such, homogenizes it and only allows the repetition of that doxa that passes through indifferent and mute beings. That reduces thinking to this mere cumulative and repetitive activity:
Excluir...transcurrirán de la cuna a la tomb muzzled by political, ethical, aesthetic conventions, etcetera, often very inconvenient, very often opportunistic with the special energy that is your person..................
................and
ExcluirTHIS "AGREEMENT" IS VERY BAD FOR US. We must resist this temptation of generalizing statements. What ARTAUD tells us is of an intensity we should not bear...
Shove the language to the mosquitoes?
(Manoel de Barros)
But we cannot be content to see Artaud's fate as that of a mere individual, admirable or sublime, who, having desired too strongly something too great, forced himself to reach a point where it all shattered. His fate belongs only to himself, but he himself belongs to everything he expressed and discovered, not as something of his own, but as TRUTH and AFFIRMATION of the POETIC ESSENCE... It is not his destiny that he decides, but the POETIC DESTINY, the sense of TRUTH that is given as a task to be accomplished... and this movement is not his own movement, it is the very REALIZATION of the TRUE, which, from a certain point of view, and in spite of it, demands that his personal reason become pure impersonal transparency, from which there is no return.
If the syntax of this literary language ''is the set of necessary deviations created each time to reveal the UNKNOWN LIFE in things, the life to which it gives access is the capacity to resist the forces it tries to capture, the inorganic power, the cosmic pressure (life that is neither individual nor personal, but SINGULAR, formed of impersonal, pre-individual singularities, VISIONS and HEARINGS.
ExcluirThis fundamental presence, whose knowledge is one of its privileged expressions, is not exclusively a verifiable fact, but a lived event. Humanity is a being-in-the-making, meaning that in every instant it manifests itself in being.
ExcluirHowever, Heidegger reminds us of the pre-given nature of existence, for for him, humankind is not bound to the image of the world as a thing integrated into a totality: it always finds itself rooted in the already-there, whose horizon is the world.
There is an irreducible difference between being and the world, since humankind is capable of questioning reality and encompassing it. Heidegger conceptualizes this as understanding; this develops before any reflective awareness, just as the situation imposes itself before the affective reaction. Existence is a "middle ground" characterized by a perpetual back-and-forth movement between the pre-given in the situation and the reality revealed in understanding. This is made explicit in the passage: “... Man is precisely this relationship of correspondence, and that is all. It does not mean limitation, but a plenitude...”
[7]
The unbalanced language that leads to an OUTSIDE produces VISIONS and HEARINGS. An original language is not carved (creusée) into the language itself without the entire language oscillating, being pushed to a limit, to an inverse, constituting VISIONS and HEARINGS that no longer belong to any language. As in Samuel Beckett, who would have endured words less and less because he knew the difficulty of "piercing" the surface of language to SEE and HEAR what lies hidden behind them.
ExcluirA language taken to the extreme, elevated to the power of the unspeakable, makes possible visions and hearings freed from the empirical, superior, pure visions and hearings, capable of seeing the invisible and hearing the inaudible, making the writer a seer (voyant) and a listener (entendent), someone who sees and hears something too great, too strong, too excessive.
Existence, in this sense, continually questions, surpasses, the reality that determines it, without, therefore, ceasing to exist within it. According to Heidegger, it is care that opens the universe of presence to humankind. Defining existence as care destroys the classic image of an isolated, self-absorbed "cogito." Thanks to care, human beings experience themselves beyond the already-there. In this horizon of transcendence, we interpret humankind as a being-in-the-world; humankind always discovers themselves as being-with. This becomes clear when Heidegger states: "... In presence, one's power-to-be-in-the-world is at stake, and with it the occupation that discovers in circumspection the intraworldly being."
ExcluirI remember asking Dom Francisco Plata what would happen if changes in light and sound (speed changes) continued to occur during daily meditation, with successive escalations of intensification, and he simply replied (to my avataric frustration, with which I had been composing a large map of the invisible world) that "the changes in light and sound continue to occur according to the gathered and transmuted energy, and that the important thing is not to lose sobriety."
ExcluirIt is possible to "measure the point" of sobriety of thinkers like Heidegger and Bataille, as well as our own point of sobriety or criticism. There are very critical moments in Bataille, and less so in Heidegger, despite the messianic ontological shift of his Last God, which, however crazy it may seem, is SAID or written soberly, while Bataille cannot even compose a novel of ideas in rhythm with the formal taste of the 19th century - his Summa Atheologica is a chaos of notebooks and loose drafts from beginning to end (DRUNKENNESS itself is constantly thought of in the heterogeneous mixture of the SUMA, DRUNKENNESS and EROTICISM).
And it may be that Bataille's eroticism, at least as far as I can understand, retains very little of a well-established tantric practice or even a truly serious exercise in meditative concentration. No one can accurately determine the degree of initiation of that secret society Bataille attended. They were ordinary French people practicing yoga in an existentialist way, drinking, eating, and fucking like everyone else, just some energetic concept at play in worldly relationships. Not even during the war was Bataille able to stop writing. Drafts of an epidemic and uncontrolled proliferation.
Excluir"It is the Authority of style, that is to say, the completely free link between language and its fleshly double, that imposes the writer as a Freshness above History."
ROLAND BARTHES, The Zero Degree of Writing
In Joyce—and it's necessary to emphasize this "in Joyce"—what are epiphanies?
I quote Joyce in Stephen Hero (1904):
(…) a sudden manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable period of the mind itself. He believed it behoved the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, since they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent moments.
There is a first period of the theory of epiphanies, a theory linked to three fundamental aesthetic principles (or "conditions of beauty") – these principles have their philosophical origin in Saint Thomas Aquinas's integritas, consonantia, and claritas. Note: integritas, consonantia, and claritas – the first formulation of a three-pronged knot.
ExcluirI quote Joyce in Stephen Hero (1904):
Integritas:
Totality, the perception of an aesthetic image as a self-limited and self-sufficient thing in the immeasurable background of space or time that is not itself (4).
Consonantia:
Symmetry and rhythm of structure, the aesthetic image conceived as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, formed by its parts and by its sum, harmonious; the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension (5).
Claritas – "Radiation" (claritas is associated with quidditas, the "what" of a thing, its "thingness"):
Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis that discovers the second quality (consonantia), the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality (claritas). This is the moment I call epiphany. First, we recognize that the object is an integral thing; then, we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, indeed a thing; finally, when the relationship of the parts is refined, when the parts are adjusted to the appropriate point, we recognize that it is that thing that it is. Its soul, its own something, leaps out at us from the garments of its appearance. The soul of the most ordinary object, whose structure is so well adjusted, appears radiant to us. The object achieves its epiphany (6).
ExcluirNow, doesn't it seem as if we are listening to a Kantian, rather than a diligent disciple of Aquinas? – Consider KANT, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), especially the first part, entitled "Transcendental Aesthetics": The A Priori Forms of Sensitive Intuition (Space and Time). Also consider LACAN, The Seminar, Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960), especially Lesson VIII, entitled "The Object and the Thing" – I quote Lacan:
ExcluirSublimation, which grants the Trieb a satisfaction different from its target – always defined as its natural target – is precisely what reveals the Trieb's own nature, since it is not purely instinct, but is related to das Ding as such, to the Thing, given that it is distinct from the object. (...) And the most general formula I give you for sublimation is this: it elevates an object – and here I will not shy away from the punning resonances that may exist in the use of the term I am going to introduce – to the dignity of the Thing (7).
Post script
ResponderExcluir"We enter, we could say," Cemí continued, "with the same dance step, because what you call disturbance, for me is the uncreated creator, God who gives us the two dimensions, the uncreated, the future, and the created, which is the past; the coinciding instantaneousness of the uncreated and the created is what we call the present. The uncreated creator acts as disturbance; we close our eyes, and the points of the imago are already flying. The sum of these points forms the imago space and converts it into a temporal continuum. Note that this process is nothing more than the uncreated futurity seeking the present instantaneousness. Then, movement will appear acting in the temporal continuum. Movement adds the imago points, circularizes and rotates them, and subjects them to polarity. This in turn engenders linearity and the force of attraction. This linearity and force of attraction, united with polarity, are the previous step to achieving the temporal continuum."
LEZAMA LIMA (FROM OPPIANO LICÁRIO)
When this temporal continuum is achieved, the two dimensions of time, past and future, disappear. Linearity and the force of attraction seek the dividing line between the uncreated and the configured, or, in other words, the points of the imago, acting in the temporal continuum, erase the differences between the here and now, between the created before and the uncreated after. What I am going to tell you now has some connection with your experiences, for you see walking and the imago also riding in the temporal continuum. The infinite cohesive possibility of the metaphor, which you see as res, as a thing, I observe as a cohesive possibility that, acting in the temporal continuum, transforms into the possibility of the imago as a body in space. The image endures in time and resists in space.
ExcluirIdem
Man participates through the image, as well as through charity, in the uncreated futurity of the demiurge, but the image is concupiscible, for it must be grounded in the created to reach the uncreated creator. Our body is like a metaphor, with a possible polarization in infinity, which penetrates the stellar as imago. Walking in the imago space is the temporal continuum. To follow this temporal continuum engendered by walking is to convert.................
Excluir....................the uncreated in the aftermath, the progressive extension establishing a novel-like quantity. “We’re already in the novel, pour la mère de Dieu, let’s not go so fast,” Ynaca interrupted. “Let’s return to the darkroom and the wandering points of light that traverse it. I remember now that Della Porta, the creator of the camera obscura, has a precious little treatise on distillation.” Cemí observed the correct interpretation of the pauses and the adequate and natural transition of the conversation; at first, he thought it would be impossible to avoid a certain concealed violence when the conversation passed from one to the other. They didn’t interrupt each other; both continued. The disturbances coincided, the imago points concurred, a furious magnetization of the horizon line.
ExcluirIdem