Fractal Ontology

Are we free, truly free, to choose what we see? Clearly not. On the other hand, are we obliged, absolutely forced against our will to perceive what is first merely suggested, and then subsequently imposed, upon everyone’s gaze? Not at all.

Paul Virilio, Open Sky

The outside, or Other, is accorded an incomparable eminence in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In his penetrating account, metaphysics desires an elsewhere. It persists within an alibi, in which we assert true life as absent. But then our idea of the other would seem to hinge upon the imperceptible — that is, upon an Other which is not other like the bread I eat, or the land in which I dwell. It is not a question of this “I,” and that “other,” but of an absolutely other. In its most recognizable (historical) form it appears as a passionate movement or turn towards an Other, which goes forth from the world of the familiar. Metaphysics turns from an at-home to an exteriority.

Metaphysics yearns to become outside-of-oneself, its desire tends towards the absolutely other — something entirely different than a need: “The customary analysis of desire can not explain away its singular pretension. As commonly interpreted need would be at the basis of desire; desire would characterize a being indigent and incomplete or fallen from its past grandeur. It would coincide with the consciousness of what has been lost; it would be essentially a nostalgia, a longing for return. But thus it would not even suspect what the veritably other is.” (T&I 33) What is the mode of desire whose essence is exteriority?

But what could be a subject of such a desire or such a thinking, whose force would consist in destroying the possibility of subordinating desire to a modality, or of rupturing the very image of thought — overturning its model and smashing its reproductions? The desire for the absolutely other is absolute, Levinas argues, since we are mortal and the Desired invisible; this desire implies our relationship with what is not given, and of which there is no idea. Vision “adequates” an idea with a thing, comprehending what it encompasses.

Beyond the knowledge which measures being, beyond brightness and depth, there is an inordinate desire for the most high: “Desire is desire for the absolutely other.” Unlike a hunger or thirst, metaphysics desires the other beyond satisfaction, and so understands the exteriority or remoteness of the other; metaphysics opens up the very dimension of height itself. The alterity glimpsed in this desire is thus not adequate to an idea, but nonetheless has a meaning — the alterity of the Other, and of the Most-High.

Not the height of heaven but the Invisible; there is no doubting human misery but to be a man is to know the dominion which things and the wicked exercise over us — our animality. “Freedom consists in knowing freedom is in peril.” To know, to be conscious, is also to have time, space to breathe, to avoid, to forestall the “instant of inhumanity”; for Levinas, it is this very postponing of the hour of treason which implies the disinterestedness of goodness, the desire for the absolutely other, the dimension of metaphysics, or “nobility.”

Common to both capitalism and democracy is competition as the basic principle of social organization. Politics in a purely competitive key has a majoritarian ring — it is monistic, totalizing, self-absorbed — whereas philosophy from the competitive perspective — and we may wonder whether there have yet been any others — are egologies. The complementary model, or sharing, has been more frequently preached than practiced. Yet it is the meaning of language: the demand for social justice is expression par excellence, the very thirst for peace. Both violence and love aim for the other in their vulnerability, but only in non-violence can truth reconcile us together.

Like a smooth or empty space, peacefulness operates without principle, without direction, without form. Yet even as a formal relation to another, it connotes a kind of difficult freedom, a consciousness which refuses to compete, which questions not its abilities but rather itself as such. A force grasps hold of us, an explosion which limits without thereby enslaving us — a relationship which forms the lineaments of a new kind of relationship between human beings, as well as between human beings and themselves.

Yet non-violence would never really be an emptiness, a pure void or absolute gap — even if war enjoys the practical status of something like an ultimate cosmic principle. While the future may appear bleak, I believe we can find a way to think, act and speak together, singularly as well as plurally, and to do so more peacefully — that is to say: more freely, more honestly, more creatively, more joyously.

The difficulty of freedom is also the problem of war: it lies entirely within the fact that the future demands our service as individuals. There is no middle-ground. We become responsible for slavery, which faces us at every turn as the “primal” injustice. The material conditions of others, the ravages wreaked upon human beings by historical “consequence,” present us with a non-transferrable ethical demand, one which is active in a concrete and fundamental sense in every dimension of life. Inhumanity is a silent anonymity, the obliteration of language, freedom and society all at once — a negative indication of the primacy of our responsibility.

Peace can only begin with myself. The passivity such a mode of human existence implies indicates a kind of subjectivity completely different than the one we have inherited from Greek philosophy. Yet passivity indicates not a lack of reason, but rather the submission to a dimension of absolute externality: a responsibility which is unlimited, which is not a debt, which is not restricted by the extent of an active commitment.

The hostages’ responsibility for their captor.

Everyone will agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality. Emmanuel Levinas—Totality and Infinity

It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us…It is a question of becoming a citizen of the world—Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense [1]

From a Melancholy Science towards a Negative Diale(c)t(h)ics

Adorno’s ethics is a “melancholy science” because it has grown weary of the subject. In other words, Adorno’s ethics is both pessimistic and antagonistic because it aims to critique the processes of subjectification which the dominant society (re)produces. On the one hand, Adorno analyzes the principium individuationis of modern society, but on the other he does not subsume it to a dialectic which would lay claim to totality through a unifying principle of identity. Yet Adorno’s critique of modes of subjectification and individuation are always brought back to the society through which they are socially and economically determined. This is what allows his ethics the means to sharpen its critical edge. The main thrust of this ethics is to assert a radical critique of the substantiality of the subject and to fully do away with the absolute, constitutive nature of the self [2] founded upon a transcendent God [3]. In following this critique through its development in a negative dialectic, we will say that Adorno’s analyses constitute a minor ethics because they submit the major mode to a critique that attempts to dislodge the dominant image of thought [4] from its normative pretensions.
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The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

Karl Marx

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Topos (biocosm)

In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came understanding and created order.

Anaxagoras [1]

What had to be accomplished in that chaotic pell-mell of primeval conditions, before all motion, so that the world as it now is might come to be, with its times of day and times of year, all conforming to law, with its manifold beauty and order, all without the addition of any new substance or force?

How, in other words, could a chaos become a cosmos?

Friedrich Nietzsche [2]

The true difficulty for psychology is that the field of the unconscious is also the site of the production and interpretation of reality. With the unconscious we encounter thoughts and bodies mixed together heterogeneously, without the clear ontological divisions we tend in other disciplines to take simply for granted.

It is no wonder then why Lacan has suggested the reality of the unconscious is the most difficult subject for philosophers to approach [3] — for there is no ontological method which could aim to find handles on this incorporeal assemblage, on this “body without organs.” In the enfolding of the psychic within the material we discover a phenomenological reality of the unconscious which is necessarily presupposed by any ontological analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacek Yerka, Port

Artaud writes that there is a possibility in theater for the creation of a new freedom, under the light of a “strange sun, [with] an unusually bright light by which the difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be our natural medium.” His unusual description points to the possibility for a radical transformation of psychic and social capability; it also points to the very real likelihood (though not certainty) that all such efforts will fail for the time being.

Of course, culturally speaking, failure is relative; a work of art is only really as profound as its failures. (Not to mention that our own failures contrast our victories, a struggle without which poetry and religion would lose all their power over us.) However, Artaud’s curious image makes it possible to see a path beyond victory and failure, beyond destiny and chance. It is always possible to act in such a way that the situation itself is transformed. It all requires the most perfect timing, the most effective and delicate deployment of intensities. Becomings must be undertaken carefully; they are apt to lose control, overflow, and fly off the handles.
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The modern break with the authority of the past begins with critical history and the possibility of an empirical investigation into reality. A clinical eye belongs to the properly empirical, trans-historical observer — the one who is provocatively “unpersuaded” by traditional interpretations, metaphysical narratives of becoming, who is skeptical of all foundation myths. Through empirical investigation one discovers the curious historical double-articulation of religion and philosophy, i.e., spiritual or psychic forms and collective authority or wisdom. Truly historical science replaces past tradition with present custom as the proper object of study, and thus by thoughtful prediction, such an inquiry opens the possibility of a non-linear relation between history and the future.

In other words, what empiricism finally rediscovers is that the future is just as deep and infinite as the past. This symmetry is the flash-point of the unravelling of hierarchical social organizations, authority, tradition, religion, etc. In critical theory, that is to the clinical eye, all forms of social asymmetry are isomorphic, but none explain themselves, none are automatic. The past and future are neither absolute nor transcendent. What matters is the present, praxis, the transcendence of history through immediate activity. The project of critical liberation expresses itself through revolutionary social progress: (1) it undoes foundations in order to unfetter potential (singular) becomings, (2) it coordinates energy collectively to produce (new) subjectivities, and perhaps most importantly, (3) it socially plans (different) forms of society.
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It is characteristic of our age that we no longer remember how to feel utopia. To experience the absence of place, a break in the flow of time. But the utopian vision is not merely a smooth or well-organized space outside of history, beyond danger and death. It is also a powerful impulse, a primary affect of sociality. The aporetic flash of insight which is glimpsed in the symphonic vision of an actual utopia is so overpowering it actually exerts an unbinding force upon thought, deforming and deconceptualizing, breaking truth down into its rhythms. Utopia as commonly conceived is above all a logical place, a space where things make sense. But what if they don’t make sense to us anymore? A utopian thought imagines radical transformation, and accordingly is a thought which transforms thought, an image taken for a radical act. But there is no act, only images of free subjects. Only endless contradictions. But we forget they are more than contradictions. They are indications. The utopian thought is above all a directed thought, a thought of direction. We can’t remember how to point to ‘nowhere’. We should not allow ourselves to forget how to feel the irony of the utopian thought. We can only sketch the subtle complexity of this ancient impulse, noting this or that feature. A general utopian political project is a false ideal; it makes utopia an act, something hard, inert, dangerous. Futurism is false; we must be against the generic utopia. We must try always to see the more subtle, and political sense of nowhere.
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Everything about the modern State is false: it is cold, mechanical and monstrous. And there is no hope for disruption: machinic production annihilates life. Capital is the calculated sacrifice of whatever is left of spiritual health: profit in exchange for humanity, slavery in exchange for inner value. The enslavement of free creativity is the only positive operation of capital. Without the knowledge of what it is to think adventurously, to journey abroad, to breathe freely, there is only the madness of anti-production: the state and the market stand as the singular figures of parasitism and death. They are opposed to culture, to freedom, to health. Economy is violence, and mute static has replaced the human spirit. This machine devours humanity: it chews, grinds, enslaves.

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How very noble!
One who finds awakening
in the lightning-flash

(Basho)

It struck me lately that Nietzsche’s style is not entirely dissimilar to the strategy employed by the Zen koan. I’m thinking in particular of the haikus of Basho: short, aphoristic bursts of supersaturated feelings, pressurized information, aimed to awaken and reorient consciousness towards new directions. The author of the haiku plays a subtle game of exchanging masks. Each voice, whether of the dawn, the crickets, the lightning, or the sea, is a gradient into other voices. Their chorus become constellations of breakpoints, fragmenting into still other registers of sound and light. The words explode the page to reconstruct the world.

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In his Existentialism and Human Emotions published in 1947, Sartre notes that what existentialists have in common is the fact that “they believe that existence comes before essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective” (3). Yet immediately after establishing this as his existentialist slogan, Sartre begins to argue that objects have essence because they were made according to a certain plan and because they serve a definite purpose. So the essence of the object precedes its existence because of its determined production and because of the use to which it is put. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s so easy to act like you forget and get out of answering a difficult question, isn’t it? Politics, of course, provides innumerable and colorful examples, because most of the lying in politics is lying by omission, intentional or not. Take, for instance, white house spokesperson Tony Donahue’s response today to a reporters question regarding whether the bombing of the Iraqi parliament which killed three Iraqi MPs represented a failure of current security operations:

“The terrorists will do everything they can to try to undermine a government that is trying to bring peace and stability for the people of Iraq.”

But does it mean our security operations are in jeopardy? The question doesn’t (and hasn’t) resulted in a meaningful response from this administration, just a blurring of the lines of responsibility. The equivocation in this quote (”undermine a government”) underscores a neglect of responsibilities, a managerial imperialism, i.e., the Iraqi government is just like ours, trying to bring peace and stability, but running against “inevitable” difficulties because of terrorism. Instead of addressing the criticisms directed at their policies, this administration relies on an implicit trust in their mission, what Bush has termed his “mandate,” which validates, a priori, any activity they perform; basically, by not addressing this criticism, Donahue is in fact addressing it the most clearly: he is saying, “You asked for this. You voted for us. You put us into office and we took it seriously. You thought elections were a joke?”

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For better or for worse, this “mandate” is conflated with aggrandizing a-historicism, a sort of pseudo-religious self-righteous globalism, which resonates well both with the religious right (”humanism”) and oil companies (”free markets”). Now, with scandals mounting and Dick Cheney about to undergo impeachment hearings, the transparent lies are beginning to be questioned. The obvious critique of this (or any imperialist) government’s desire to “bring peace and stability” to Iraq is slowly being reformulated. We swore never to forget; this administration seems only to forget, to break its promises and the law. Donahue’s comments give evidence to a widespread and intense aporia: specifically, he seems to be forgetting that we made possible the conditions which allowed the Sunni revolutionaries to rise to power, in fact, we are the ones who planted the seeds of these toxic inter-sectarian conflicts.

To wash our hands of it, even rhetorically, even to escape answering more difficult questions, is neurotic, amnesiatic, but worst of all, it’s cruel and irresponsible. It makes more sense to us than it is comfortable to admit that, to the citizens of Iraq, we are the God of Death. Not that Iraq would have been peaceful or not without us– but that due to our role in the history of the development of that country, we function as the rebel God who donates fire right into the hands of Saddam, one of the most dangerous and repressive rulers in history.

Fidelity to the event of September 11th requires not becoming or supporting terroristic groups or governments ourselves. How easily we forget, or pretend to! The immense spectacle of false images which were necessary and sufficient to provoke the otherwise extraordinarily apathetic American populace to war is already evidence of the fundamentally false premise under which this “war on terrorism” has been and is still presented, waged and represented six years later.

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The fact that we had to be tricked to go along with this conflict means that the fight is wrong, and the ideology needs to be updated. This war is more about oil than it is about, say, democracy, September 11, or Christianity; however, more than oil, this war is about imperialism, it’s necessary and sufficient condition was a feverish, but short-lived and long-regretted super-nationalism. Iraq is about nation- and empire-building. But this is flatly contradicted by democratic ideals; aren’t we “all” supposed to build the nation? We “all” participate equally in free society, we “all” form the body politic in which the vox populi is lodged, etc, etc…

This idealism is what is taken to be true before anything else, and it is here that it pays most to be critical, and not to give an inch to superstitution and self-blinding delusion. The most generic expression of the current war is founded on a syllogism: since we are a democracy, we are able to institute it elsewhere. Besides the fact that this doesn’t even logically follow, it is begging the question via the preliminary presumption that we are indeed a democracy, that we value social equality, and so forth. From the mouths of aggressors and warlords, this is ultimately a blind idealism to empty concepts which allows us to forget about our hypocrisy, our deception, our narcissism and our imperialism. In fact: this leader, this administration, this “war”, are all spectacles, all justified by simulation, which represent an intervention against democracy.

The identity of the same is an equivocation, a place without place. The “I am” is an assertion of allegiance before it attains any sort of meaningful substance, and this allegiance to the same name in the face of the other is the second term of meaning, the same/other dyad being exceeded by their connectivity, which erases their separate identity– and resolves an irreducible separation by re-inscribing this self-difference already in the name of the Other.

Your name declares your genealogy, arrives as the for-what and for-whom you stand; your name stands for you, it already effaces your identification as any separate, autonomous being. A name is a confession to belonging, inclusion into a community of speakers, who at the least acknowledge your awareness. The name is the essence of symbolism. Thus the name presents us with a triple reflection towards/away from/towards the subject: my awareness of the others’ consciousness of my presence already convokes the declaration of my name, albeit by the voice, or even the slightest movement of the others’ hand, at last, merely her gaze accomplishes the same reflection which is sanctified, or rather purged of sanctity, in a name.

But the name only refers to the break within identity; it is the first material, or rather vocal illusion, which in hiding a deeper separation and mystery from itself, refers back to the ultimate illusion. This being the faith in appearances, images, letters, the religious illusion, if you like– though this is confounded still more by cross-currents from the premodern, modern and postmodern re-crisises of faith– but what all of this amounts to a sort of status quo, not progress but exactly a deadlock.

Faithlessness, whether in divinity, in institutions, in religions, in society, or in culture, is here to be read as that symptom of a heartbreaking disappointment, “yet another defective situation.” It is a resistance– to the other in whom trust is not to be placed, leaders who fail at their post and take us not into the promised safety but rather deeper into danger than we were before. The death of God is neither ontological nor religious–it occurs in the loss of faith in the Other, when we observe that justification and responsibility are no longer the criteria of political economy.

Or worse, they never could be: power is not fairly distributed, even so the distribution is irrational, “up for grabs,” as it were; the world seems bent on continuing a destructive spiral of violence and war… Even though boredom is counter-revolutionary, it is not hard to see that apathy is intelligent psychological self-defence in the midst of this perfectly reasonable, terrifyingly irrational society we’ve become. Alienation, disillusionment, disconent–all this speaks to a mass abreaction, to a steadily quickening pace of Events, and to the failure of static institutions to adequately respond, to represent, to keep count, as it were.

The fact is that many if not most of the institutions we are supposed to have faith in have long been exposed as a sham, whose main accomplishment was accomplished at its founding–and it seems as though these institutions have continued existing as if in mourning for the ecstatic heyday of its inauguration. But reactionary behavior patterns, acting only insofar as a spectator, affirms the spectacle of the culture industry, interacting with others through an interference pattern of images.

Belonging to modern society is a non-participation, a relation without relation– Our identities have only a derivative existence, mediated through the mass market, which was the historical moment in which the production of identical lives was made possible. So there is a sort of inevitable, irreducible gap within identity itself, not just in its relation with the Other; but there is another kind of break with time which currently prevails, a dangerous amnesia or alienation of identity from its own future, which with respect to the individual is equivalent to the void (uncounted) place of the individual in the prevailing political economy, his (social, legal, religious) position of powerlessness and weakness in the face of an absolutely transcendent Other.

This is why much of the discourse on ‘respect for the other’ is misguided, since it recognizes only an apologetic stance towards the approach of the other. But what if the other comes to me with war and hate in his heart? Should I both to attempt a face to face resolution? Or, rather, should I protect what is mine, protect myself from the machinations of his evil intent? The resistance towards the repressive other is also an unavoidable ethical stance. But a society without peace is a non-society, and mercy towards the other cannot exist without love.

Freedom is not merely our birthright; it must also be excerised, demanded, that is to say, we must produce freedom positively. Negative freedom is slavery; this is the weakness of the doctrines of ‘tolerance’. They reflect only the powerlessness of the spectator, or rather the false choice of the spectator (what to watch, not whether to watch,) reducing the gap between cultures to the choice between, say, marlboro and camel lights– it speaks of the disconnected, unsatisfied lack inherent in the cycle of addiction without truth or completion, in which it becomes easier to accept than challenge, and we resign ourselves as spectators of the tragic dramaturgy opened up by this radical separation, this inversion of life into non-life, and thereby we are convinced into giving away our birthright: finally, we accept the prevailing status quo, quite ready to defend our right to non-freedom at all costs.

Against culture, we must produce freedom constantly if we are to be free; not hectically, at though trying to catch up with it, as though it escaped our grasp: we produce freedom not by exerting our power, but our right to powerlessness– that is, living without paranoia, without the need to grasp and conquer and destroy, without allergies to the differences of others, without this primitive, aggressive culture of dominance, acquistion and nihilism.

Freedom is the constant demand of this right, the right to peace, without which there can be no society at all. Else we are merely spectators, devourers of the perverse, apathetic images which mediate our entire existence– without peace, there is only non-life, a closed life without life, as a defective, uncounted, exploited appendage of some incomprehnsibly colossal, terrifying war machine and its endlessly entertaining, fantastically profitable culture industry, which together invade, colonize and dominate our entire existence.

Thus freedom is a wager on peace, on the possibility (however slim) of a non-repressive society which lives and breathes freely, which has maturely accepted a limitation of its spontaneity. Culture as it currently exists is a spectacle of images which interpose and mediate our relation with the Other; it is anti-ethical. Thus culture is the socio-political surgery of separating Being into beings, infinity from itself, a reduction of the subject to the pure form of the void. We belong to a culture to the same degree we are de-formed by it–that is, how deeply we believe in its truth. The “truth” of such a violent, permissive culture is the moment in a falsehood in which it is expressed, for this culture will tell you whatever you want to hear, as long as you’re paying up. Thus the political consequence of not resisting such a monological and destructive modality of culture is the revenge of the same violent logic of subtraction: the sudden reduction of every infinite multiplicity– to the same empty image reproduced forever.

We are all familiar with this comic turnabout in older cartoons: that absurd situation involving, usually, a rampant chase, or sometimes a backwards-treading showdown, which ends with the unfortunate victim running headlong (or deliberately pacing) into frightfully empty space. Suspended oblivious in mid-air off the edge of a cliff, the victim of this joke pantomimes the sprinter’s circular leg motions–and, of course, his forward velocity only stops once he has realized the ground is no longer beneath him, that is, gravity only actually “takes hold” in the moments following the ‘revelation’ wherein the character ‘real’-izes that it should have already taken hold of him.

Why is there humor in this moment? Because we recognize ourselves in it: immersed within a theme of universal separation, i.e., surrounded by “nothing,” humor comprehends that the universe is not what we decide it is, but is always only what we real-ize it is. More generally, a joke “cures” us as a vaccine does, by reproducing the disease in an ‘innocuous’ form; in particular, the joke neuters a radical or contradictory situation, but by exemplifying the inconsistent and exaggerating it. There are at least three reasons for this. First, by impertinently giving voice straightforwardly to an a-sensical disjunction, we disarm the imminent threat of the contradiction, we “open up” a void in the world in order to distract ourselves from the actual void, but only for a time–even though by doing so, we (”inadvertently”) introduce further tensions via themes and association, tearing open an infinite number of linked and novel inconsistencies. Which is why, secondly, jokes are a release of unconscious tension: by placing these contradictions into the (”logical”) temporal sequence of events, we “master” and therefore obliviate time itself: humor owes its existence entirely to deliberate timing. Third, by encapsulating the paradox, we position the feared object strictly within the horizon of thought; but a joke always wants to say more than it says, and humor lives entirely in the gap between what is and what is said.

By reifying the glitch between language and being, the joke strikes us both as true and absurd simultaneously, and thus offers a glimpse beyond the horizon at an alternate reality, as enjoyment and effulgent feeling which is not a surprised knowing but is precisely laughter. Thus a joke is a narratively structured mis-leading which is just hypnotic enough to cause a momentary “hiccup” in our stream of reality, the improvised incorporation of an alien and unexpected rhythm. This moment is a break that mends us, a tearing open of a wound that heals us, if only for one instant, from the irreducible lack in this defective world, a makeshift vaccine simultaneously made for and from the inevitable brokenness of being (one-self).

Humor is this cure which reifies the terrifying eruption of naked existence itself. Although a humorous euphemism seems only to reiterate the ‘feared’ or ‘broken’ object in a clandestine and reconstituted shape, it is really a way of forgetting the thing itself, for within the bounds of this deliberate act of self-deception our abstract fear and tension dissipates, but not by being erased: rather, we express the tension all too directly, we magnify and externalize our unnameable fears, surround ourselves with it until it is colossal, all-consuming, cosmically terrifying, and then, of course, it can no longer hurt us because we realize it has become altogether too much, which is, of course, never enough. A joke is only really funny once. A stale joke reeks of the fears which caused it to be created as an armor piece in the very first place.

What is funny in this delayed falling, in the “hiccup” moment of the cartoon just after the unfortunate victim realizes there is no longer support beneath him? It is because the victim himself thereby brings about the very end he only suspects. We identify with the victim of the joke in this minimal terror of sudden foundationlessness. An unstatable fear because it echoes an ex-centered tension, or threat creeping in from beyond or outside the situation, and this fear which is precisely what-is-stated. Indeed, by stating our unstatable fear, this joke is giving voice to the “wavering” between language and reality which underlies our most strictly held beliefs, indeed, our ‘real’-ity itself. A joke, whose superbly joyous and free existence depends almost entirely on its timing, reveals the uncertain temporality of existence itself. The delayed timing upon which this joke depends, the hesitation literalized in this mid-air suspension, reifies the everyday situation where our very fear and ignorance brings about the thing which causes us to be afraid. Perhaps because fear and tension make us distracted and thus vulnerable, allowing us insufficient attention towards ominous constellations of coincidences– (who knows, perhaps the perverse tendency of dangerous but unlikely scenarios to occur at a rate so frequent it would seem to belie their statistical improbability rather reveals our own unconscious though “deliberate” hand in their occurrence, not only in the paranoid formation of nightmare-fantasy but in this precisely forgotten transference between the semi-bodied half-dreamworld and the all-too-real situation–) such “coincidences” indeed turn out to be anything but, since between our crippling fear and empowering anxiety, we are mired in a generative though aversive amnesia: we ourselves bring about the most feared, least favorable condition by our own hand even as we try to prevent it, because we try to prevent it.

An obsessively-feared ocurrence is so dark we cannot help but clarify it, so unthinkable we cannot stop imagining and re-realizing its occurrence. But it is the same fearful thing against which we would enthusiastically raise our entire being up unless the thing in itself did not already present our own desire so completely and positively that to contradict it would be already to contradict this moment of resistance itself, to contradict our own superimposition. Our existence is itself nothing; our position within reality is arbitrary, random, meaningless; but the sequence of events in a human life is anything but arbitrary, anything but random. Such a suspension in mid-air is the result of a deliberate forgetting, an act of doublethink: a moment is forgotten, but (not) consciously, for we remember to forget (to remember…) The “x” which was to be erased is rather just crossed out with another “x”–but such self-censorship is not yet futility, even though through the act of repression itself we give a priveleged place to the underlying unadulterated truth. Repression admits of multiple possible modalities of enjoyment even as it denies this possibility, and is an erasure of (alleged) “bad” through a violent un-forgetting of the “right” way to do things: a legal limit on infinity is already close to society’s definition of ’sanity.’

Self-censorship is an internalization of an entire society into your own mind, and already an expression of loyalty and dependence upon the entire chain of social appearances; thus can we only coherently externalize our “unique” (i.e., apart from “society”) attitude towards life through irreverence and disobedience towards society itself? “Breaking the rules” reformulates the exact structure of repression, though in reverse (”Now, I will impose MY reality upon YOU!”) and thus fails completely to liberate: rebellion and discontent and chaos is not the same as completely liberated and uncensored desire– which means “organized resistance” is already an irony and a contradiction–resistance, ultimately, is banal, about the every day situation, our allotment of time, and what we DO with it–and so “organization” already re-expresses the very repression which justice demands we resist. The problem, of course, is that of replacement: what do we do now that the old organization is out of the way? As Lacan remarks apropos of the events of May 1968, those who look for new masters will surely find them. The question is entirely one of the correct expression of master morality, which is a difficult and obscure question with troubling dimensions. But resistance in slavery is the alternative, and moreover is ludicrous, since we deny and affirm the same state of affairs simultaneously. For between freedom and repression there is a gap, and it is only in between that events take place– in our following, we cannot move to either side without already becoming both part of the happening and irreversibly excised from it. Thus we are forever completely caught up within the “real” situation, without being able or willing to extricate ourselves–and, we are also wholly engrossed with the situation as an obstacle to be overcome: we prevent ourselves from passing beyond or through by the very fantasy that we are at a crossroads and that we are supposed, somehow, to “choose correctly” (even though we may be in “anguish”) and “move along” as though we could terminate eternally all relation we ever had to this event. But we are afraid to say “yes” and afraid to say “no,” and the truth is that it is only when we are unrecoverably stuck in this gap between absolute planes of existence, we actually have a choice.

Only in this gap between the “so-called” choice, which is so axiomatic, simplistic and pure as to be almost meaningless, do we ever exercise any sort of potentiality which could actually be called a freedom. But this freedom is always and only a freedom to perform a repressed act–(perform what?)–the act of demonstrating the existence of freedom, that is to say, an implication, the presentation of the possibility of a violation, the presentation merely of the possibility of such a performance, though it may ultimately be absurd in the cosmic sense. The possibility of something different than the ways things are, in different way than we are used to considering, is worth something: indeed, it’s worth everything, it’s the underlying rhythm of every joke, and the message of every joke is sympomatic of a pre-existing censorship which declares in almighty absolutes the limits of possibility. Thus humor is a teasing of the limits of the virtual. For example, art is always created in response to a repression, and expresses as always only an enduring, resistant, immanent freedom itself, in defiance of the censor: art is an asymptotic transference (i.e., an emancipatory event, an event at the ‘boundary’ of infinity.)

We are to be free in order to show others that there is repression– we recognize in the delayed timing of the fall the true reality beneath appearances, that is, that we willingly suspend ourselves in mid-air, in universal doubt and hopelessness, in subjective anxiety and existential straits and spiritual hardship, in thoughtlessness and boredom and hesitation– not in an attempt to change the ultimate outcome (which is, in any case, known completely in advance,) but simply to escape ourselves–

As in all jokes we learn from these cartoons a truth about freedom, which is only funny because it doesn’t help–we already know that we cannot become free just by running away, whether from repression or from the object being repressed. The revelation is incarceration: we’re only trapped when we realize we’re trapped, left only to perform our meaningless dance in that unnameable intersection between the void and the law (violence/death/universality.) It is not obvious this “metaphysical” situation is not an academic question, or that an agnostic position over this kind of freedom is a contradiction, already choicelessness and pure nihilism, e.g., “supposing such choices are only theoretical, how can they make a universal difference?” It is important that the repressed memory here is humor itself, or more generally, the positivity of the void: running away won’t make us free, because the very force of the desire to escape the threat causes the unwanted event to come about. Pure escape is a paranoid fantasy just as absolute knowledge is a generic paranoid pretension. The difficulty here is that paranoid certainty verges on reality with a cryptic and surreal twist: we are indeed trapped. But then the question for freedom can therefore never be one of pure escape. Rather it is always particularly framed as the problematic of absolute separation, the difficult practical questions of pure revolt, the invocation of thought upon an eminently logical rebellion, a rigorous, a priori militant resistance to injustice. Freedom must be therefore be expressed as simultaneously particular, universal, and transcendending the universal: as resistance in the name of truth, as intolerance in the name of justice, and as courage in the face of annihilation—-