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Glenn Wallis: I guess it starts, in terms of the production of work or whatever, with this band Ruin…
Speculative Non-Buddhism
Stranger Subjects: Interviewruins of the buddhist real
I was recently interviewed by two super-smart and creative young men, Andrew Blevins and Jonah Sprung. Our conversation was just published by The Flood, an online magazine “that sits at the confluence of radical politics and spirituality.” As this description from their site indicates, this blog and The Flood share at least one very important interest in common:
Histories of spirituality and social movements are inseparable. Experiences of the sublime bump up against the mechanisms of the state, bureaucracy meets intimacy, and the mundane is disrupted by jubilation. The Flood explores this ongoing relationship and asks: as the waters rise, how can we help each other stay afloat?
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Glenn Wallis: I guess it starts, in terms of the production of work or whatever, with this band Ruin…
Excellent Interview Glenn. About the stranger subject, is there a danger that constantly assuming the attitude of critique creates a kind of subject who is also blinkered, just in different ways to those subjects created by urges to conform or by beliefs in transcendence? If you hadn’t sustained a kind of belief in the power of Buddhism over so many years, your critique would not have become as informed as it is, you would never have developed the insight into the tradition that now allows you to critique it so powerfully. Doesn’t the accrual of deep knowledge involve phases of suspension of disbelief? The effort to understand Laruelle (or some of your own writings for that matter :p) needs to be powered by a belief that it might not make sense now, but if you stick with it, it will eventually. So how do we walk this tightrope between faith and critique? Punk that had been more aware of its tendency to set rules as to what dress, behaviour etc was acceptable, might have had a more varied wardrobe, but would surely still have been defined by a certain attitude that would open some conceptual doors while closing others? Edward Slingersland approaches topic this in Trying Not to Try. Ancient China embraced both Daosim and Confucianism, seemingly very different philosophies, because each could balance out the excesses of the other, and one or the other may be more appropriate depending on the situation.
My overall point is, is the best approach to play a kind of dance between decision and suspicion of decision? Does the Real, as the limit of what can be thought, become ‘smaller’ over time as we do this?
Interesting interview. I think you get right to the core of the problem I have with Laruelle—at exactly the point where you get stuck and say “I’m butchering the whole thing.” I would argue that Laruelle is making the same mistake you point out (in your recent book) so many x-buddhist teachers are making. He slips in a bid for transcendence, while claiming he is the only one to avoid doing this. The idea that the real is outside of language is exactly the problem, the mistake we need to avoid.
Laruelle is right that Deleuze does make this mistake. He reduces all of the social to the oedipal narrative, and then asserts that we can be free and authentic subjects (what he calls Originals who live in Primary Nature, among other terms for it) only once we escape all social constraints. Laruelle does the same thing, when he embraces the myth of the given, the idea that we can live free of social constructedness. I can see, then, why this would appeal to someone used to Western Buddhism—it follows the same basic logic of claiming to avoid transcendence by simply refusing to call your transcendent terms what they really are.
I would argue (have argued?) that it is better to follow the Lacanian concept of the Real, as something that always and only follows from the symbolic order. Language must precede and construct the Real. To think we can escape language by tarrying in the Real is the worst kind of disempowering delusion, because it forfeits our capacity to change the symbolic order.
We are social animals, and we need to realize that sociality, or social constructedness, is not the other to our freedom, but is the source of our freedom. We can escape the natural necessities other animals are subject to because of our ability to use language, and work within social structures with intention. What I like to call “Fear Of Sociality” is, to my mind, the greatest problem we face today. The idea that we cannot, and should not attempt to, engage in and change socially constructed practices. The idea that anything really real must not be socially constructed at all. We cannot bear to take responsibility for creating our own world. Retreating into the Laruellean real is not different from things like evolutionary psychology, neuroreductivism, or belief in divine law—all different ways to avoid the responsibility of sociality.
Sure, it’s important to avoid reifying a particular social/symbolic system. But we don’t avoid reifying, and gain the power to change, when we fantasize about escaping into pure language-free immanence (one of Laruelle’s terms for this is “the Real-in-person), any more thane do when we fantasize about escaping into Primal Nature. Laruelle is just one more version of the Romantic ideology, presented in yet another set of arcane neologisms.
You do a good job of pointing out where so many others fall into this error. Why do you still have this Fear Of Sociality? Lacan would suggest an oedipal dilemma, I suppose. Anyway, that would seem to a good explanation for my inability to engage in the social more successfully…but I have no illusions that there is any alternative.
Hi Gavin. Thank you. I understand “blinkered” to be a synonym for “human being.” So, yes, it goes for the stranger subject. It is precisely that deep-rooted proclivity toward blickeredness that necessitates systems like x-buddhism and, particularly, their critiques. About the “accrual of deep knowledge,” I agree. In my Cruel Theory heuristic, I have an entry called “fitting proximity,” which argues something similar to you. About walking that tightrope: the need to do so is why I introduced the trope of x-buddhism as a critique subsumed within an ideology subsumed within a faith. It’s all bound up together, as I understand it, anyway. It’s a question of degrees and of opacity. To what degree is, say, secular-buddhism or soto-zen-buddhism, each? For instance, I would argue (in fact, have) that secular-buddhism is primarily a faith fashioned in the form of a humanist ideology and involving only the pretense of a critique. The non-buddhist work aims to re-calibrate the mixture so that: critique is primary, persistent, and explicit; ideology is present, acknowledge, and defended, yet defanged of its sufficiency; and faith is an ephemeral specter haunting the [w]hole yet never materialized, much less realized. So, yes, on that dance. And yes, on that smaller–eventually disappearing altogether.
Hi Tom. You are raising an issue that is as important as it is difficult. Rather than me take yet another brutal stab at it, what about writing up your criticism of Laruelle on this point. I will then ask any or all of the following Laruelle thinkers to respond: Anthony Paul Smith, Katerina Kolozova, Joshua Ramey, Alexander Galloway. I will publish both your critique and their responses on the blog for further discussion. Thoughts?
Just to try to light the fuse, I will repeat that I am convinced that Laruelle avoids all of these charges (of Romanticism, of endeavoring to slip past language, of escaping in Primal Nature, etc.) Of course, that avoidance never takes the form of a philosophical argument. It takes the form of a discourse that precisely refuses to make epistemological and ontological pronouncements. That is not to say that such a non-philosophical discourse is not profoundly effective–of a subject, of a World, and in the world.
Are you in?!
Ah, a year or two ago I would have enjoyed this. Now, I’m afraid I just can’t do it.
But on my reading, what Katerina Kolozova says about Laurelle seems to be exactly right. As I’ve said here before, I think she proves my point exactly–she just thinks that this proposed escape is possible and a good thing. So I doubt the debate would get anywhere. The idea that there can be no “philosophical argument” to clarify this position is, again, exactly the strategy of Romanticism–the production of an ideology at the level of affect and practice that remains immune to thought because it won’t engage in thought. Not much different from Wordsworth, really. There’s no arguing with someone who says their position is outside of argument, right?
I’m afraid I have to conserve my energy these days for smaller things I might actually accomplish. But I’m sure there’s someone out there, probably much smarter than me, working on just such a critique of Laruelle.
Okay, Tom. It’s an open invitation. I think it would be a lot of fun.
Laruelle is not claiming for his ideas that they lie “outside of argument.” He is claiming that those ideas are well served only in relation to another type of application, one concerning creative usage. Maybe we should take it as a clue to his theory that my artist and musician friends almost intuitively grasp the spirit of his thought. Similarly, we can take it as a clue as to what philosophy is that philosophers only want to (are only capable of?) arguments of quite specific forms. I certainly see x-buddhism’s identity as being wrapped up in a quite particular form of presentation. The form, moreover, remains intact only by means of the adhesive called sufficiency. The same goes for Romanticism, of course. It, too, is just a human material that we could do all kinds of interesting shit with. The problem with Romanticism doesn’t lie with Romanticism. How could it? It’s just a mass of inert human chora. The problem lies with the human propensity for creating ideological Golems. Wordsworth is no more the definer or master of Romanticism than Frankenstein was of his monster or Sharon Salzberg is of x-buddhism. Our human participation in the deaf and dumb Real has led us to create Romanticism. It’s ours to mold into a whatever material.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised that artists and musicians “get” Laruelle. Deleuze has the same kind of following—writers and painters just “get” him easily. Because the ideology of art is still thoroughly Romantic. I always think this is obvious, but it doesn’t seem to be to most people.
I wouldn’t agree that Romaniticism is “inert human chora,” and this is, I think, the fundamental difference in our positions. Romanticism is the human social practices that produces subjects, and in very limiting, inherently capitalist, ways. (I am a Romantiicst by training, so this too has long seemed obvious to me…). The idea that we can exist outside of this practice, that it is just material we can pick up an use, assumes a kind of transcending, not socially constructed, subject that I just don’t believe exists. So no, Salzburg doesn’t define x-buddhism, but x-buddhism does produce her. We can’t “mold” Romanticism, it produces human subjects. We can only do something other than Romanticism, if we don’t want to be that kind of subject. This is very difficult to get people to understand, though. If it’s weren’t we wouldn’t still be Romantic subjects after all the work done to demonstrate the limitations of this particular ideology. But I’ve made these arguments so many times…I doubt it’s worth making them again.
Tom, how about re-fashioning a Wordsworth poem as a form of non-romanticism? That is, retain Romanticism’s impulse to correct the cold, heartless errors of the Enlightenment’s cult of Reason, but refuse to potentialize Romanticism’s yearning for transcendence, its collusion with capitalism, and so on. I’d love to read that poem!
Tom – how can what’s real only follow from language? Don’t animals live in the real world without language? I’m reading Jack Kornfield’s (excellent) “No Time Like the Present” at the moment, in which he encourages us to hold our feelings in loving awareness – not our words for feelings but the actual feelings. Are you saying a feeling of, say, frustration is constructed out of words? At first insight it certainly doesn’t feel that way to me!
Who’s suggesting we not attempt to change socially constructed practices? Are you fighting straw Buddhists here? Have you any quotes from x-Buddhists saying “Don’t oppose Trump in any way, don’t even vote against him…” I bet even Kabat-Zinn and Kornfield vote, and not for Trump.
How is evolutionary psychology avoiding the responsibility of sociality? Doesn’t it suggest that we evolved to live in a hunter gatherer society, and point out that the human animal is thereby a very social animal?
Glenn – on Laruelle not claiming that his ideas lie “outside of argument” but are served only in creative usage – can you give an example in the Buddhist context? To me it seems like you are saying, for example, that Buddhist ideas like “letting go leads to the end of suffering” can be argued about, but only after putting the ideas into (long) practice can the ideas be seen to be correct – argument doesn’t really come into it, except for motivation, or in case of failure (!)
Tom – I find your idea that romanticism might be a human social practices that must produce a subject limited to our ‘orrible, everyday, capitalist reality is intriguing and might have some mileage. At the moment, I’m probably spending too much time reading novels and listening to Brahms, which is really a romantic escape, wheel spinning (even if the wheel has bright lights, and makes a pretty noise…)So don’t give up making this argument! Any good introduction to this argument?
Glenn – great idea on taking the transcendent out of Wordsworth. I’ve always had great doubts about his woolly transcendentalism and nature mysticism. Maybe Tintern Abbey would be a good one to try?
No presence that disturbs me with some joy
No elevated thoughts; no sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
No one dwelling in the light of setting suns,
nor the round ocean, nor the living air,
Nor in blue sky, nor in the mind of man:
No motion and no spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
Nothing rolls through things. And I am not
A lover of the meadows and the woods…
Maybe that last line is going a bit too far, but then again, maybe not. Can you still love the meadows and the woods if you ditch Romanticism? I remember reading an account of a Wordsworth fan who took a Tibetan Buddhist monk for a walk in the woods and he was appalled that the Tibetan felt no “sense sublime” and couldn’t wait to get out of the wood and back to the comfortable hotel.
Is “love of nature” anything more than a by product of evolutionary psychology, so really a “wood with spirit” is no more than a good place to gather food; apes feel pleasure when they see such an environment, just as they feel pleasure during sex, where pleasure is simply an indication that a good way to propagate genes is present.
… well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
No anchor of my purest thoughts, no nurse,
no guide, no guardian of my heart, no soul
Of all my moral being….
Doesn’t Wordsworth’s overly romantic view of nature lead to suggestions that it can do more than it is capable, which is actually leads to suffering (when you realise Nature and Romanticism isn’t the solution! ) I mean the follwing lines are just unbelievable, very pretty, but just unbelievable:
…. Nature … can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
Over 90% of the English countryside was held by robber barons in Wordsworth’s time (over 50% still today…) All that country living produced greedy capitalists with few lofty thoughts, with evil tongues, with rash judgements, with excess sneers, little kindness; and their blessings included things like the “highland clearance”, Irish starvation, Native American genocide, and the slave trade. Still I bet the robber barons read this and kidded themselves that they had lofty thoughts & good judgment because they lived in big houses in the “beautiful countryside”. You can see why Wordsworth became an old reactionary beloved by the Tory establishment.
Glenn,
That’s the point—the ideology is in the form, the social practice, of poetry itself. Just as you say that philosophy can only recognize argument that take a certain form, we can only recognize something as a poem if it takes a certain form—if, that is, it produces the capitalist subject not just in its content but in the practice of reading it. That’s why there are no leftist poets! All the canonical poets are on the extreme right (even the feminist poets are producing a capitalist kind of feminism). To remake a Wordworth poem so it is not producing capitalist ideology would only be to produce sometime other than a poem. So, perhaps, a critical essay on a poem. A demystification of the poem’s ideology—which is a kind of text, but not one that produces capitalist/Romantic ideology. Would you “love to read” such a text? Probably not in the same way (although I do enjoy such texts, it is a different kind of enjoyment.
And the important task is to escape the Romanitc idea that reason is cold, oppressive, and evil. A non-romantic ideology would have to see reason as freeing, as enjoyable, as a joyful social activity. That would be radical.
Mal,
The Real doesn’t mean “reality.” Read the interview—Glenn makes it clear that he is not using the word in that way. I was responding to what he says in the interview.
It’s a little shocking to imagine someone believing that voting against Trump would make one not a capitalist. Surely the Goldman Sachs Administration (er, I mean Obama administration) was thoroughly neoliberal and capitalist. So, sure, Maybe Kornfield votes against Trump….but that woudn’t make him in any way radical or subversive. It would just make him a good capitalist American, participating in the ruse of democracy…
On the question of Romanticism as capitalist ideology, a good place to start is the chapter “The Rise of English” in Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: And Introduction. He outlines both sides of the case briefly (Romanticism as radical, and Romanticism as capitalist ideology). Another classic text on this is Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology. There are dozens of other books alone, and countless essays. If you’re a glutton for punishment, you could read an essay I wrote thirty years ago, “The Ideology of Wordsworth’s ‘Michael: A Pastoral Poem’.” I try to give a specific example of how a Romantic poem produces capitalist ideology.
On evolutionary psychology, well, I took that to be too obvious to need explaining. The whole premise there is that social construction is nonsense, all the things we do are hardwired into us by evolution. Fear Of Sociality is the entire motivation for all of evolutionary psychology, and cognitive psychology, and all the neuro-everything pseudo-disciplines.
Tom – I take Glenn as saying the Real is the “real reality” whereas Garfield, and most other Buddhists, have a wrong picture of reality. From the discussion:
GW: “The Buddhists talk about pain, right? And they talk about pain as a Real, as a human Real.”
I’m taking this as Buddhists say that pain, “suffering”, is “really” real, you can’t argue against pain. Suffering is something encountered in life as something of fundamental importance, nothing is more real, nothing is less in doubt. So in capitalising “Real” he stresses that Buddhist think pain is really Real! Buddhists in talking about pain as Real – are saying that pain is really Real, it’s not some false reality like (say) Christian ideas of reality.
GW “Jay Garfield… says pain is… something that is inseparable from human existence. And the Buddha talks about pain in that way, to a certain extent… But then he starts talking about pain—and the Buddhists themselves do this—as something that can be uprooted.”
Good point – there is no evidence that pan can be uprooted so Garfield is moving from the reality of pain to a fantasy world where he thinks it can be pulled out of human conscious like a tree can be uprooted from the ground. So if Buddhists are saying “In the Real, pain can be uprooted”, I agree with Tom that Real is not reality in this case.
Heck, I think we may just be talking around different definitions here. Could Tom or Glenn provide their dictionary definitions of “Real” and “reality” please?
GW: “So [at first,] Garfield is talking about the human Real of pain. It’s this condition that is pervasive, that is occurrent at every moment, even in a moment of pleasure—because pain comes from change, so that the pleasure arises and dissolves and disappears in the very moment that it’s occurring. That’s what the Buddha would say. That’s what makes pain so pervasive, what makes it a human Real.”
So does this translate as “Garfield is talking about the human unreality of what-he-thinks-is pain.” Is Glenn saying that Garfield, and most Buddhists, are wrong in thinking “pain is pervasive, concurrent at every moment, even in a moment of pleasure”? Is he saying that pervasive pain is not part of human reality? If so, I’d tend to agree, surely humans often feel pleasure, and that’s not pain!
GW: “for Laruelle, … the Real of pain—has created the Buddhist notion of dukkha. Garfield makes the mistake of thinking the Buddhist notion of dukkha is explicating the Real of human pain. Does that make sense? The Real is something in Laruelle that you cannot make pronouncements about… But when he talks about the Real, he’s not talking about something that exists … it’s not like a hidden reality … For Laruelle, the Real serves a certain function in human thought… it’s an element in thought that prevents us from lapsing into a kind of idealism and transcendence, that produces a certain subject he called the stranger subject, who abides closely to this thing.”
So is the Real a term used to refer to things that are “obviously real to immediate human perception”. So, if I’m getting this, actual pain is Real, the fact I am “seeing something” at this moment is Real, I’m sipping a coffee at this moment and the taste of that coffee is Real.
But dukkha, as a theory of suffering, is not Real, and produces the absurd idea that pleasure is pain. The Higgs boson isn’t Real because it’s far beyond immediate human perception (even atoms aren’t Real – the feeling of heat that we might assume comes from warmed atoms of air is Real, we cannot be wrong about feeling the warmth, but the heat might actually come from solar radiation not speedy atoms of air! )
“B: So the Real is purely non-linguistic.
GW: Yeah.”
In summary, Tom, I think Glenn, after reading the interview a second time, does think that Real means reality. If you want to expand on why Glenn doesn’t think Real means reality, please do. I may be totally confused about these matters. (Please don’t tell me to read the interview again, if I haven’t got it by now I certainly will not get it by reading it a third time…)
Hi Tom.
“the ideology is in the form”
That fact is the entire reason for the “non” project! I think you, or someone, absolutely can write a non-romantic poem. It would retain the vital potential that is encoded in the x-romantic form while depotentializing whatever you take to be errantly subjugating.
“To remake a Wordsworth poem so it is not producing capitalist ideology would only be to produce something other than a poem”
Exactly! It would be a non-poem. Hence, necessarily strange and estranging to reader-subjects properly interpellated into x-poetry, but potentially liberatory to those in whom rings aporetic dissonance.
Glenn,
Okay, so, I think I’ve already done this. Really. Read my essay on Wordsworth’s “MIchael” that I mentioned above. This is what I mean by the kind of text that is “something other than a poem.” And reading it might have a real ideological effect—the effect of demystifying Romantic ideology. But I would guess that such an essay is not the kind of text you have in mind. You’re looking for something that “retains the vital potential” of form, but I would say that this particular “vital potential” is exactly what needs to be dropped. The whole idea of “vital potential” in a poem is the problematic ideology, leading to obfuscation and loss of agency, etc.
Mal,
No, on my understanding I think you’ve pointed out the problem very well. Laruelle does both say that the REal is something other than reality (it is the “something you cannot make pronouncements about”, the limit of thought, the point where they symbolic order is exposed as a social construct, etc., just as Lacan would say), and he ALSO assumes that there is a Real (with the capital R) that is a direct, ideology-free perception of what exists, free of all social construction (the Myth of the Give, the bare non-conceptual perception, etc.). This is the problem I’m trying to point out. This is, as you demonstrate, self-contradictory. And I would say that it is so exactly because it is yet another bid for transcendence that fails to recognize that it is one. So, Lareuellians can only talk endlessly about how radical thier way of thinking is, but cannot ever DO anything—to actually take an action would require lapsing into “decision”, a terrible thing. The Stranger Subject remains like the Neoplatonic Christ, promising redemption at the level of the imaginary, instead of the Markan Christ, demanding active discipleship in the world—they just reliable non-action as radical action…and there you are. This is my concern: decision, from my perspective, is a very good and desirable thing, provided only that you know you are making it, and are willing to take responsibility for all of its consequences.
Hi Mal.
“B: So the Real is purely non-linguistic.
GW: Yeah.”
Yet, in being such an a priori, in both the psychoanalytic and Laruellen senses, the Real becomes “infinitely effable.” It appears in language via literally countless names. It is just such a name, a “first name,” that a good psychoanalyst would want to attend to in his analysand’s discourse. But “it” is not a feature of reality–reality here meaning the Worlds created via such naming, framing, acting, etc. “It,” in Laruelle’s sense, is precisely an axiomatically posited feature of our thought, valuable for its Ideal-routing capacity. The axiomatic functions ensure that it itself is not Ideal. An axiom is not true or false; it just permits a certain kind of work or operation. Laruelle will critique the psychoanalytic Real for being, well, Being. Such Being would seep into the actual world, becoming a feature of reality. Thus, Laruelle introduces the feature of “foreclosure,” such that the Real never exits itself. Really, what that move amounts to is that the entire point of the “non” work is to do something with some x-material. It all comes down to ceasing argumentation and act.
Tom. “Radical,” for people working with Laruelle’s concepts, is a technical term. It denotes the result of performing the “non” functions, namely, a paring of excess transcendence. So, they are doing nothing if not “radicalizing” some x-material.
Yes, exactly what I was saying. They just redefine the word “radical” to mean nothing at all radical…
Unnecessary neologisms, an entire (and constantly shifting) specialized vocabulary that blocks all criticism (you just don’t understand our new and secret use of the term..), insisting on changing the way we think but not anything we do, and the refusal to see a fundamental conceptual error. All these sound, to my naive ears, exaclty like Philosphy As Normal. I do get the appeal of Laruelle. It is the same appeal that all relabelings of Romanticism have. The same appeal that Buddhism has to westerners. It allows one to keep ones fundamental delusions in place, while thinking one is completed free of them…to be a reactionary while mistaking this for radicalism. Like Blake, or Swinburne, or Yeats, or….it’s a very common phenomenon in Literature. This may be why it seems more evident to me than to others; I’ve seen is so many times before, in so many forms. Surely I’m not the only one who sees this, though.
Tom. Really? So we should employ language that was decided and fixed…when?…with the original grunts of Adam and Eve? Language can’t be used creatively to shape new ways of seeing? The irony here may be that your thinking leads to some version of pre-linguistic purity whereas the Laruellen one that you’re disparaging is assuming that it is forever language all the way down. Your comment itself contains numerous “neologisms”–terms fashioned at a particular point in time to bring something new into the world. Were or are they “necessary”? Can you give us an example of a sentence devoid of “unnecessary neologisms” and “specialized vocabulary”? Another irony is that the Laruellen usage of “radical” is about as unspecialized and unsecret as you can get, paring back to a root. I will just repeat myself for the thousandth time and say the the entire point of Laruelle’s method is to get to work fashioning forms that we believe bring something useful in the world. Ultimately, arguing about it is like arguing about whether you may play an F#m7 in the G scale: play it and see what happens!
I have to say, Glenn, I’m surprised by the cheap rhetoric here. I didn’t expect it from you. Can you really be taking me to say we should return to some primal language? Are you really incapable of distinguishing between the necessary and meaningful progress of language and the use of neologisms to simply avoid clear thought or reliable and recycle discredited concepts? Do you really think I can’t tell the difference?
The sophistry here suggests that perhaps you’re feeling cornered on this point—so maybe we’d best leave it there.
And yes, I can offer an example of a sentence devoid of UNNECESSARY neologisms—the sentence in which you asked that question, for instance, is one.
I do hear what you are repeating—but it is just that, repeating, You (and I would say othe Laruelleans as well), cannot respond, only repeat.
Show me an example of this “paring down” and I will explain, yet again, why it is nothign new—just the same old Romantic ideology posing as radical. Wordsworth, by the way, was very fond of this “paring down.” Read the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” It is a standard Romantic trope.
Tom. “Cornering” is a move in a philosophical game. Comment threads on this blog that take form of argumentation are endless precisely because of the circular nature of the very form (philosophical argumentation). I am saying let’s all be done with argumentation and get to work creating the forms—textual, personal, institutional—that we think might produce the World we desire. Like delusions, there is no end to philosophical argument.
I am as allergic to the formation of transcendental illusions as anyone you’ll ever meet. So, I was very pleased to discover in Laruelle a practice of countering such formations while preserving the raw human cultural materials from which they are formed. I wouldn’t want to see the obliteration of Romanticism, mysticism, Christianity, Buddhism, or many other seemingly problematic ideologies. But I would love to see these forms reimagined. In fact, I am currently working on a redescription of a German mystical text. It’s pretty fucked up, this text, but with some extraordinarily potent lines of thought that it itself leaves unthought.
Onward!
Thanks Glenn,
Yes, I very much like this idea of a critique within an ideology within a faith, and the parallels you draw between this and Freud’s id, ego and superego. Your last line threw me, about the possibility of the Real disappearing altogether…how is this possible?
Hi Gavin. Thanks. I’m not sure which “last line” you’re referring to. In the book or in the Flood interview or in a comment here?
Hi Glenn! I mean, the last line of your reply to my earlier comment, which I interpreted as meaning that the Real can eventually disappear completely.
I mean that the limit becomes “smaller” over time, minimalized, closer to us, or we to it. Ideas like unilaterality, axiomatization, foreclosure, in-the-last-instance, etc. are so important because they prevent the Grand and Perpetual Error of our believing that the limit is ever crossed, and that we may venture into the Real. This is, it seems, a difficult point to grasp because it frolics so intimately with the Error itself. Anyone who understands Laruelle or, more importantly, works, thinks, and lives in this vein himself, could never believe that consummation follows. In the end, what matters is that the reduction of the limit means a life lived ever more intimately–and immanently–in relation to the fecund Real. Maybe we can say the the Real “disappears completely” in the sense that “it” ceases to be an idea, and becomes, rather, a brute yet fluid force in a life. I think the most difficult aspect of this kind of thought is that it sounds philosophical, but is not. Maybe if Laruelle had been a musician rather than a philosophy professor we’d have an easier time with it.