“It remains true to this day that Spinoza is the only philosopher who ever moved an inch beyond the meta-ethics of Platonic selection, though only by the most terrifying experiment in onto-theological “optics” ever witnessed. He got the closest to the event, to the pure light of infinity, and the thrill tore him to shreds. Only a logical skeleton remained.”

I wonder if Wittgenstein has been considered eligible for belonging to the “people who moved beyond Plato’s meta-ethics” category? Having done little formal study of the logical soundness of the “Platonic forms”, I’m hung up on a comment by Walter Kaufmann that “the great antipodes of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein’s thought was the Platonic theory of forms” (for the life of me I can’t find the reference for that footnote…) I can’t quite follow his metaphor–did Plato as a figure divide them or somehow place them opposite each other? If so, how can their mutual indebtedness to Spinoza and Socrates be thought in light of this? I know that in “On Sense and Nominatum” Gottlob Frege argued for a theory of definite descriptions defined by the three categories of “referent”, “sense”, and “image”–having no ear for Lacan or Barthes’s sense of the term “image”, let alone Deleuze’s, image was an unscientific, perhaps inessential category for Frege: “Surely, art would be impossible without some kinship among human imageries; but just how far the intentions of the poet are realized can never be exactly ascertained.” Russell attempted to collapse Frege’s distinction between “referent” and “sense” by establishing logic as a foundation for mathematics, partly because Frege seemed to believe in the existence of Platonic “sense entities” (a “reified essence”, as you put it) which we all have access to through language. And then Wittgenstein stepped into this mess and did… something.

I bring up these analytic guys not to muddy the topic but maybe to try to point a way out from the darkness of some of these paradoxes? The image of light that you start with strikes me as Biblical/theological in a traditional way: “At the limit of metaphysical interpretation, light signifies pure love, it rips apart the bonds of meaning, it is pure signification itself, the voice or song of the universe — and the noisy soul responding.” (the “noisy soul” might be like the “clamor of being” that Badiou sees in Deleuze and Deleuze’s thought.) As we know, the Bible starts with God making sure to keep the darkness away from the light. Maybe this reflects a tendency for humans to fixate on the visual and the image as carriers of signification over the other senses, or maybe seeing (clearly) really is that good. Either way, this emphasis on light adds signification to the metaphor of the “eye” and adds utility to the term “optics”, which in turn adds echoes of profundity to Spinoza’s life and vocation as a lens-grinder: “Abandoning the family business, he learned lensmaking, he became a craftsman, a philosopher craftsman equipped with a manual trade, capable of grasping and working with the laws of optics.” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p7) If Marx enters into this discussion, might it be through the paradox of poesis in the “will to truth”, which you call “a creative fire driving out the darkness”? The actions Deleuze speaks of, while not only Stoic, also can’t be understood well in terms of production, be it of truth, historicity, or even production of an event, if such a thing can be produced and not only remembered: “Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with one’s eternal birth — to become the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions, for the action is itself produced by the offspring of the event.” (149-150) How does the metaphor of birth so easily escape the mechanistic schema of production, procreation, or even dispersion of a virus? (taking Socrates as a paradigm of Curious Genius Man, perhaps Agent Smith in the Matrix had an accurate view of human nature, or of the “desiring-machines” Deleuze and Guattari speak of in Anti-Oedipus.)

The way you say Spinoza “got the closest to the event” confuses me as to an event’s singularity, or to the validity of these spatial metaphors to express proximity to a purity which must be unable to enter language in a way that is understandable for subjects who must find themselves and their perspectives Othered. As you say, “Thought breaks down before pure events, crushed between the “notion” and the “real” event.” Here I’m interested in the way Socrates’s “very existence is metaphorical, founded upon remembering only its own lack of knowledge.” I like that articulation, as it casts Socrates in a Nietzschean light with respect to epistemology and praxis. A problem immanent to reading and writing is (perhaps most effectively) exemplified by what some have called the Socratic Problem: our understanding of the Real of Socrates and his thought is reliant upon the Imaginary of Plato through the intermediary of recording–production of a text causes memory to happen to us as interpreters, in a sense. After the section about Spinoza that I quoted at the start of my post, you introduce a neat identity paradox that echoes the question of Socrates’s existence in relation to his thought: “How does the event become pure and immanent necessity, even to the point that we can say: there never was a Spinoza, or stranger still — Spinoza is eternally no one?”

This doubt of historicity and identity, coupled with the starting point of the post (that liberating the “soul” from fear is a peak of absurdity) reminds me of Kierkegaard, but take that with a grain of salt, since I haven’t actually read Kierkegaard yet. I read an Introducing Kierkegaard book which said that Kierkegaard thought that Jesus’s literally being God’s form on earth would be the very pinnacle of absurdity, and because of this, it would be critical to the question of what it means to be or become a Christian. (a question which Wittgenstein struggled with on and off, despite his Jewish family history–and of course, Nietzsche has another deeply entangled relation to that question) Thinking on pure intuition now, I’m making some connections between Kierkegaard’s idea of the “knight of faith” as somehow a possible mediation between the impossibility of circumventing fear or suffering and a way to be… natural or at peace, despite this?: “Every reversal of Platonism produces a Stoic, seeking within actions, within passions, the singularity of the event driving them, the unity of natural and divine necessity.” As Nietzsche started losing his grip on reality, it was the dialectic opposition of Dionysius and The Crucified that disintegrated what there was of his personality (if he wasn’t (always) already irrevocably deep in a play of masks in a Kierkegaardian sense).

Boy, well, there’s a lot of nonsense to be had there. Hope some of it isn’t. Keep up the good work!

Tina Russell