24/06/2024 - 26/06/2024 [the eternal masochism of the middle ground │ oh jurors │ Kant-Wittgenstein-Žižek-Augustine]
24 06 2024 morning
‘I love you for who you are,’ etc. Herein not the “slow cancellation of the future”, but simply its total demolition. Sincerity as the vanguard of death.
Her body, the working classes; the rain, the means of production. The relationship between them, the, uh, history of all hitherto existing society –
Proust, for whom the “stages of grief” are strictly spatial –
Kierkegaard to God: “but have you tried looking at me from over there? Or from over there?”
Like the archetypal counters of sheep, but what they count off is a series of perfect arguments as to why sleep is impossible for them. When these arguments finally slot together into a watertight whole – they’re asleep.
To love is a change not in tense but in voice: e.g., from first person to second, from third to first. Pick what you like, the only requirement is change.
Similarly, to move on from love requires retelling your life in the voice of negative-you, or negative-they, or negative-I (pick what you like, the only requirement is complete negation). Everything else, the light on the the water, her body interpiercing it – the only time you saw one object touch another – must remain unchanged despite being observed from the ‘new perspective’ of no one actually having been there at the time.
(In relation to love, a change in tense is merely comic.)
Judaism: masochism.
Islam: sadism.
Christianity: sadomasochism.
But everyone claims that they’re the sadomasochist, they’re the one stretched out between those two impossible poles. But this proves the point: nothing in the will to compare but the eternal masochism of the middle ground.
Distrust of religion: how can they love her, in the face of this eternal priority? But I do the same, only with lakes, swamps, soft hillsides… And where is the difference here? Nature was invented the moment God died – as a technology of mourning.
All nostalgia which is not nostalgia for God is nostalgia for nostalgia.
Democracy is the worst possible political system, but there is nothing else (that would meet the requirements for a political system); the formal structure of the body is the worst possible indicator of the soul, but there is nothing else (that would meet the requirements for an indicator of a possible soul).
25 06 2024 evening
Much love in the will not to repeat one’s father’s mistakes: he would lose his originality.
The voice of consciousness: “If the world continues to exist for one more second, I’ll kill myself!” But consciousness is saved because time doesn’t add up, it endures.1
(But anyway, suicide under fifty is merely discursive).
“I’m not responsible for my actions,” the suspect says, “my behaviour was determined by all sorts of external causes, my father, you see-” “and which door,” the prosecutor asks, “did you enter the courtroom from? That one?” “Yes–” “And did you move your hand towards the handle, apply the appropriate pressure to the handle, and then, having twisted it the requisite amount, push? “Yes, yes, but–”
Or: “And did not your father and your mother, on a certain night, make use of a certain type of caress? And did not their formally opposed cellular excretions, in a strange meeting of accident and need, finally unite? But under, oh jurors, what implied guardianship? One which, I put it to you, like a parasite on the wing of time, has flown, continues to fly, is alighting now, oh jurors, right before your eyes –
Or a prosecutor who asks the defendant to clench, then unclench, then clench, then unclench, his hand. After several hours, the squirmy tension on the jury bench, fully magnetised to this dramatic display of anatomo-cognitive synchrony, congeals into a collective scream –
Everyone is guilty for everything, but the prosecution rarely has the resources to trace things that far back –
“The only thing that sexually arouses me is deception,” he said. A little later, by email: “the non-expression of my sexual preferences is their only condition.”
Kant-Wittgenstein: that of which we must not speak, we cannot speak.
My sense of basic distance, my ability to determine where things physically are in my visual field, whether one, twenty, or two hundred feet away – I find all this increasingly contingent on my ability to love.
The female saint who dreams of being fucked by God does not commit the sin of desire – which is no sin – but, since contingency is a condition of arousal, the sin of questioning God’s necessity.
Or, with Žižek-Augustine, desire for knowledge is not the cause of the fall but its consequence.
But would be the point of knowing what the cause of the fall was, since it was nothing but the inauguration of the irrevocable? Nothing but knowing what the cause of it was constitutes the fall.
“Eve ate the apple as an act of Marxist praxis–”
“Have you read Kafka or are you just pleased to see me?”
26 06 2024 evening
Tate Britain
A new trend: works of conceptual art which evoke the feeling of reading a badly written novel in which two characters go on an unsuccessful date to a conceptual art exhibition. The focus is primarily on how bored they are with each other, but there is at least one sentence saying something like, ‘a full-size replica of an authentic Bavarian kebab kiosk but inside there was a single Peruvian coin.’
A strange beauty in men older than me, who, being statistically nearer to death, appear to be engaged in a sort of mass ritual sacrifice on my behalf. Which explains my sudden fury at the self-referential masculinity of this boy, just down from university –
But with women it’s the opposite: what I perceive in men as their pre-lived memory of death, I perceive in women as a sort of unfolding sexual signature –
If I only I can figure out some way to die first, you think, mid-fuck, then this act really will have a clear meaning!
And thereby the psychosocial challenge of those who cross this supposedly self-crossed line:
“But slow down buddy, isn’t there already, right here, something of a goddamn intersection? Haven’t we already cornered the market – yes, we identity-of-the-same bros – on your dark, möbial transfusions? Aren’t we already stuck at the axis of a four-pointed cross with a frosted mirror jammed down the middle? No?”
Well, so they say.
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Bergson, Creative Evolution
I dragged my hunger through the desert
toward the man on a ladder holding a book
Where is the rain, I ask
Does the book speak of rivers?
Does the book tell of seas?
He says he needs words then runs off with my voice.
Now when he speaks what he says becomesthe limit of my world
Wittgenstein. Fascinated before but Now I get it.