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The essence of popular culture is wit: that startling conjunction of things that do not seem to belong together. The dialectic of popular culture would be a dialectics to the second power: the reason of the phenomenal is not its hidden reason, but its manifest unreason. There is no moment of dissolution inherent to the structures of popular culture, but only the progressive accumulation of ruins.

The utopian moment  is not the refusal to recognize contradictions, not the demand for an illusionary moment of final reconciliation, but rather the belief in an architectonics of ruin: that while only the ruins of life are possible, these ruins are truly life and are either  building up to something, or going no where.  Optimism and pessimism are both utopian. It would be wrong to think that anything but the ruins of life are possible, yet it is just as wrong to think that these ruins are enough.

Achieving the feeling of having already read something is indispensable for reading it well. This sounds more paradoxical than it is. The first time you read a text, there is an anxiety that arises from not knowing its parameters, not knowing, in short, how much it will require of you. Every text could be the text that you will never understand. Only with reference to a text of absolute density that eludes your reading radar absolutely does reading make sense. Thus, reading truly starts only once you determine the proximity of this text to the absolute text of your fantasies. It matters little that there be different ideal frustrations from different absolute texts for different readers. What matters is the iterative practice of reading that does not truly begin until the second time through, once the task of understanding has been triangulated. In this light the first reading is an utterly necessary waste of time.

On the absurd imperative to be untrue (the demand for difference, or toward a truly historical scholarship):

Be untrue!

1. To be untrue to this imperative is to be true to it. In the first intuition, this is correct (since to be true is to be untrue to the imperative); on the second intuition it is the worst case of betrayal (for this is to be true to it).

2. To be true to this imperative is to be untrue to it. This is the more complex case. In the first intuition this is an error–one clearly disobeys; in the second intuition it is thus the truest (to disobey the imperative by being faithful to it, by disobeying). The second intuition, where the limits of understanding are, shows that being true is valid because it is invalid (since fidelity is forbidden and being unfaithful is commanded). In sum, to be true or untrue to this imperative is to be untrue and true, whereupon the dialectics of fidelity evaporates into a woefully thin immediacy that says: words fail, only just act!

If truth is that which commands you to be true to it, through trust, thus creating a feudal relationship of vassal and master, only a transcendent, eternal truth can ever be true. Attempts at articulating an historical truth fall prey to the antinomy of fidelity, and turns into bad empiricism, or confusion.

An absurd solution to the antinomy: recognize no imperatives.

Non-absurd solution 1: be unfaithful to the word fidelity, while still using it. Give it a history, such that it does not continue to mean the same thing. This would be something like Benjamin’s fidelity to the worn and outmoded.

Solution 2: purify truth of the antinomy of fidelity. Adopt one of many other concepts of truth, coherence, deconcealing, plausibility, etc.

Problem: as a scholar or thinker, a concept of fidelity operates in your dealings with any concept of truth; insofar as you hold it, you hold it to be true. An adequation theory of truth operates secretly in scholarly activity, and perhaps in all reading. At the dumbest level, the flashes such as “Do I understand this?” “I understand this!” “He doesn’t understand this,” without which one could not dispute over the meaning of truth, are critical for intellectual activity. How can it continue without this operative assumption?

Solution 3: change intellectual activity from the ground up such that the theory of truth can mark, infect, guide, color the very attachment the intellect has to it, and to intellectual intercourse in general.

This last step is the step beyond scholarship, into…

Granted that violence follows upon flight, that violence is a flight from flight: this only suggests the absolute, dire necessity of a critique of flight — of thinking a prospect of flight that does not simply reproduce violence, that does not produce violence as the flight from flight. We may even concede that no actual form of flight can entirely dispose of violence.  It can never be a question of entsetzen, but only entstellen: of the slightest sliver of a new prospect of existence, askew from the violence of the given order of things.

If we stay put, it is true, the continuum will appear as an illusion. And it is no less true that the launch of flight away from the continuum depends on the continuum. But the point can no longer be to stay with the continuum or dispose of it. To wish to dispose of the barbarism of the real as mere illusion is also a form of flight, and perhaps the most violent.  We must reject, precisely as the violence of nostalgia, both the desire either  to stay with the continuum of history or break out of it.  What we  seek to comprehend, instead, are the stratifications of history, its geological, if unearthly, aspect.  Its richness, or, even better, its radical plurality: that history itself is neither one nor hopelessly fragmented. Each of these stratifications is the product of a flight, which did not seek to run away somewhere else, but to find, or even invent,  a new place.

Granted: violence is the flight from flight, and flight is a violence against violence.  Just as reason leads itself around in circles between  the justified means and the just end, a thinking that is beyond reason  cannot help tying flight and violence together.  Is it possible to discover distinct criterion for flight and violence: to think flight apart from violence, and violence apart from flight? This is the  question…

(those who are truly in flight have left their gods behind.  But are they then godless? That there is no god of flight is its greatest distinction. But there are gods that do not yet exist, not even in hope)

Traditionally, a metaphysics of morals manifested itself in the concept of flight, if not in every actual flight. Flight was flight from God and flight from the self — fugere se ipsum, whose remedy for Augustine was carried out in his confession: “retorquebas me ad me ipsum” — I turned myself back to myself, which sentence, in saying it to God and indirectly to the world, became thus a turn back to God. Let us propose two theses about flight. One, any image of flight there is already a confession and actualization of not-fleeing. Two, there is no God of flight itself, and thus those in flight are godless insofar as they imagine their flight to be a permanent, even a good thing. Flight is evil insofar as it claims to be good, and caught in this opposition it is by no means beyond good and evil.

The context for these reflections, it would have to be admitted, is the Hebrew bible. And this brings up a concern with Benjamin’s formulation of a definition of violence. He does not formulate one. He does not say that he means a violation of another’s will or right, nor does he compare it to punishment, or to the breaking of a contract, to an exercise of the passions, or an infraction against an unwritten code, such as honor. It is certainly a theological effect, judging from his examples, but there too he mixes Greek and Jewish contexts without regard for the differences. In both contexts, however, we could say that the paradox of flight — that it supports the violator by confirming the violating power of his violence, and thus it is no flight, but only a movement — is operative, in, on the one hand, the Odyssey, and on the other, the scatterings and wanderings in Genesis. In both cases human violence accompanies, in point of fact, the re-imposition of a state of non-flight called “home.”

Violence is thus nostalgic, theologically speaking, and follows upon, as opposed to preceding, flights. It is the clash between reality and the illusion that sustains one fleeing. There is one instance of violence, therefore, that is left out of Benjamin’s scheme: the violence of identity. Not state-founding nor state-preserving, but the state-imitating, nostalgic, returning to paradise destruction — this is the underlying concept of violence that unifies the two. It is also the violence that springs out of flight; flight is the womb that gives birth to this destructive tendency.

Non-flight appears as flight, but flight appears as non-flight. Vertical or horizontal, the desire to spring out of the continuum depends on the continuity for its launch. In contrast, stay put in the continuum and it will be shown to be an illusion.

Just as the critique of violence seeks to articulate the interior structure of violence, ultimately seeking to think violence (which has always been understood by reason in the only way reason can understand things: as the relation of means to end) in terms of the relation, no longer thinkable by reason, between a pure, non-violent means and the pure, absolute violence of the end (the manifestation of Walten), so the critique of flight seeks nothing less than to articulate the different modes of flight, and, ultimately, to think the flight from violence apart from the violence to which, through a dialectical movement originating in violence, it is always drawn back.  For indeed we could say, provisionally, that beyond the mythic flight, which always remains under the mythic threat of violence and which thus cannot be conceived otherwise than in terms of a logic of victimhood, there is also a divine flight, which does not just flee from violence, but founds  an asylum beyond violence. And one could say moreover that any theory of history, however philosophical, which refuses to recognize the institutive power of flight, a power (and of course this word must be used carefully, but it must also not be avoided. Not all power is violent) that drastically shifts the topology of historical time away from the increasingly sterile opposition of continuity and discontinuity, can only repeat mythic violence, however hard one tries to escape from it. Even Benjamin’s analysis of violence suggests the ultimate limits of such a perspective — ultimately the perspective of manifestation. Divine violence is, he claims, in every way opposed to mythic violence. The very principle of opposition is itself unthinkable outside of the mythic order. The interruptive moments in history do not happen just in the continuum of time, but vertically, as it were.  Non-mythic flight does not make manifest, for to the extent that it did, it could only manifest violence itself, as the power of manifestation. The difficulty of thinking a power that does not make manifest coincides with that of thinking language as neither human nor divine.

At least one addendum to the critique of violence is necessary: a critique of fleeing. For it would be a mistake to think that history (or evolution) has only to do with modalities of violence (law-creating, law-preserving, and law-destroying), or, for that matter, with law. It is only from the perspective of law-creating violence that violence appears as the creative power, but this perspective has always been opposed by another: the perspective of those who flee from violence and the law. And from this view  flight, which neither opposes nor overturns the law but merely skirts it, is infinitely more creative than the violence that initiates it.

The idea is not the ground or measure of experience, but its illumination. There is, however, no simple correspondence between experience and the illumination of experience.  The illumination of experience is a decision that at once belongs to experience, and transcends it.   Every experience awaits illumination, and yet what it awaits is not absent, but excessively, superfluously, there. The task of criticism is the reduce the excess to a single point.

The medium of illumination is language. We might speak of a pure language of a philosophy that has freed itself from the task of explaining, or judging, reality. It is not a matter of rejecting metaphysics either by returning to physics or to the deceptive common-sense virtuosity with which language explains itself, but of inventing in language figures of truth.

Philosophy can approach politics only when it has abandoned the pretenses of political philosophy.  It is not for philosophy either to judge politics, or abandon it, but to touch upon it; gently and yet with a transfiguring force.  Politics is both a practice and a theory of experience. Philosophy, in contrast, is neither theory nor practice, but the sense of theory and practice.

The transcendental grounding of experience  is not the goal of philosophy, but only a starting point.  A transcendental deduction should do nothing more than allow experience to appear in its sufficiency — not as an end in itself, but so that is can become exposed to sense.

The distance of theory and practice is always the result of a philosophical violence — the violence of making experience subject to judgment.  Experience becomes virtuosic — automatic, one might say — when this distance collapses, and it is only in this virtuosity that it becomes possible to lead experience back to, and beyond, its sufficiency.

When you give an infant a pacifier for the first time, it seems like a miracle. Suddenly there is nothing to worry about, for parent or child. The mystery of its cries, the ineptitude of the parent, the existential terror of mortality reflected in natality, the political terror of an as yet totally undominated life–all this is expressed in the piercing bawl, with its stutters, gasps, whines, and gurgles, and all this is sucked away in the fake breast, the rubber nipple that fulfills no need other than sucking. Before its introduction, the baby is more articulate than the parents, who coo and whistle, or become utterly mute in frustration, as they try to push the savage thing into its place in the chain of being, without the primary tool to do so: language. Instead they make it cute, cover it with animal prints that symbolize their triumph, subduing the animal by reducing it to primary colors, typology, forcelessness. The baby is more civilized than the parent: it doesn’t try to tame them. Quite the contrary–it draws them to the brink of barbarity, to rage and the verge of murder while looking up at them with innocent eyes. The sleep it unintentionally denies them drains their civility with the mother’s milk.

All this mayhem is masked, silenced, repressed–the alienness of the baby and the chanciness of its catching on to the system that would sooner devour it than let it escape unmarked–by the pacifier… until the baby, who perhaps does not lack the coordination, but surely the experience it needs to be able to replace it, suffers an irrevocable catastrophe, the first milestone. The pacifier falls out. Now the baby cries, but for a reason clear to everyone. A new terror slowly begins to take over, along with a new savagery, one that is now properly called barbarian because of its dialectical relationship to culture, home, passionlessness, reason, foreclosure of accident–all that goes under the name of peace and quiet. The cry that means nothing now signifies, and with it the baby has become a man, capable of doing symbolic violence–perhaps the only kind–with its reproachful cry.

Let us beware of homo sapiens, pacified by the rhetoric of evolution. When it loses its sucker, how it will bite!

“Finally, it’s time to write and think this body across the infinite distance that makes it ours, that brings it to come from a site more remote than any of our thoughts: the exposed body of the world’s population. (Whence a necessity still completely indecipherable: this body calls for popular writing, popular thinking.)” [Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus]

“One day, when the cold had slowly started to abate, I sought out the man of science.  The Klein bottle was on his windowsill. I considered it. ‘Now I understand,’ I hastened to say. ‘In this bottle, inside becomes outside and outside becomes inside.  Because there’s no inside or outside, we can’t talk of containing the inside — the notion of closing it has no meaning here.  If you just follow the wall, you can get out.  So in this world the notion of enclosure itself is an illusion.’”

[Cho Se-hui, The Dwarf]

“Look, this whole business revolves around me. I’m a machine, and we have to keep the machine well-oiled.” [Michael Jackson]

Lest we forget, the roman heritage of this word brings with it a republican politics of the throng, the crowd, the multitude, envisioned as as unruly, politically potentially ruinous, but always susceptible to repression by means of the brightest spectacle, caesar’s golden crown, crucifiction, or the crimson blood spattering the floor of the circus maximus. In disapora, conversely, celebrity disappears, as does the victory celebration, all for one and once and for all. In the internet there is no further celebrity, and perhaps no further war as we have known it since Troy. And there is no more common man, at least outside of the commercial realm, which represents an ever smaller part of the tenuous but splendid tissue of minor idiosyncracies. The indiosyncratic is one form of appearance with a different political structure. This might appear as a loose group of computer hackers.

The public venture was a flop. No one submitted. In an act of desperation,  digging up ghosts from the past, we even submitted, ourselves. This still could not save us.  But enough. We leave the public arena, which we never entered, with our dignity intact.  Back to solitude… or duality.  

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There once was a girl who skipped too many steps. Her friends couldn’t play hopscotch with her anymore.