The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, with an introduction by Paul Auster

Introduction:

Invisible Joubert, by Paul Auster

Some writers live and die in the shadows, and they don’t begin to live for us until after they are dead. Emily Dickinson published just three poems during her lifetime; Gerard Manley Hopkins published only one. Kafka kept his unfinished novels to himself, and if not for a promise broken by his friend Max Brod, they would have been burned. Christopher Smart’s Bedlamite rant, Jubilate Agno, was composed in the early 1760s but didn’t find its way into print until 1939. Think of how many writers disappeared when the Library of Alexandria burned in 391 A.D. Think of how many books were destroyed by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. For every miraculous resurrection, for every work saved from oblivion by freethinkers like Petrarch and Boccaccio, one could enumerate hundreds of losses. Ralph Ellison worked for years on a follow-up novel to Invisible Man, then the manuscript burned up in a fire. In a fit of madness, Gogol destroyed the second part of Dead Souls. What we know of the work of Heraclitus and Sappho exists only in fragments. In his later years, Herman Melville was so thoroughly forgotten that most people thought he was long dead when his obituary appeared in 1891. It wasn’t until Moby-Dick was discovered in a secondhand bookshop in 1920 that Melville came to be recognized as one of our essential novelists.

The afterlife of writers is precarious at best, and for those who fail to publish before they die—by choice, by happenstance, by sheer bad luck—the fate of their work is almost certain doom. The American poet Charles Reznikoff reported that his grandmother threw out every one of his grandfather’s poems after he died—an entire life’s work discarded with the trash. More recently, the young John Kennedy O’Toole committed suicide over his failure to find a publisher for his book. When the novel finally appeared, it was a critical success. Who knows how many unread masterpieces are hidden away in attics or moldering in cellars? Without someone to defend a dead writer’s work, that work could just as well never have been written. Think of Osip Mandelstam, murdered by Stalin in 1938. If his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, had not committed the entire body of his work to memory, he would have been lost to us as a poet.

There are dozens of posthumous writers in the history of literature, but no case is stranger or more obscure than that of Joseph Joubert, a Frenchman who wrote in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth. Not only did he not publish a single word while he was alive, but the work he left behind escapes clear definition, which means that he has continued to exist as an almost invisible writer even after his discovery, acquiring a handful of ardent readers in every generation, but never fully emerging from the shadows that surrounded him while he was alive. Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher nor an essayist, Joubert was a man of letters without portfolio whose work consists of a vast series of notebooks in which he wrote down his thoughts every day for more than forty years. All the entries are dated, but the notebooks cannot be construed as a traditional diary, since there are scarcely any personal remarks in it. Nor was Joubert a writer of maxims in the classical French manner. He was something far more oblique and challenging, a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that never came to be written, a writer of the highest rank who paradoxically never produced a book. Joubert speaks in whispers, and one must draw very close to him to hear what he is saying. He was born in Montignac (Dordogne) on May 7, 1754, the son of master surgeon Jean Joubert. The second of eight surviving children, Joubert completed his local education at the age of fourteen and was then sent to Toulouse to continue his studies. His father hoped that he would pursue a career in the law, but Joubert’s interests lay in philosophy and the classics. After graduation, he taught for several years in the school where he had been a student and then returned to Montignac for two years, without professional plans or any apparent ambitions, already suffering from the poor health that would plague him throughout his life.

In May 1778, just after his twenty-fourth birthday, Joubert moved to Paris, where he took up residence at the Hôtel de Bordeaux on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. He soon became a member of Diderot’s circle, and through his association with Diderot was brought into contact with the sculptor Pigalle and many other artists of the period. During those early years in Paris he also met Fontanes, who would remain his closest friend for the rest of his life. Both Joubert and Fontanes frequented the literary salon of the countess Fanny de Beauharnais (whose niece later married Bonaparte). Other members included Buffon, La Harpe, and Restif de la Bretonne.

In 1785, Fontanes and Joubert attempted to found a newsletter about Paris literary life for English subscribers, but the venture failed. That same year, Joubert entered into a liaison with the wife of Restif de la Bretonne, Agnès Lebègue, a woman fourteen years his senior. But by March of 1786 the affair had ended—painfully for Joubert. Later that year, he made his first visit to the town of Villeneuve and met Victoire Moreau, who would become his wife in 1793. During this period Joubert read much and wrote little. He studied philosophy, music, and painting, but the various writing projects he began—an appreciation of Pigalle, an essay on the navigator Cook—were never completed. For the most part, it seems that Joubert watched the world around him, cultivated his friendships, and meditated. As time went on, he turned more and more to his notebooks as the place to develop his thoughts and explore his inner life. By the late 1780s and early 1790s, they had become a serious daily enterprise for him. At first, he looked upon his jottings as a way to prepare himself for a larger, more systematic work, a great book of philosophy that he dreamed he had it in him to write. As the years passed, however, and the project continued to elude him, he slowly came to realize that the notebooks were an end in themselves, eventually admitting that “these thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life.”

Joubert had long been a supporter of revolutionary views, and when the Revolution came in 1789, he welcomed it enthusiastically. In late 1790, he was named Justice of the Peace in Montignac, a position that entailed great responsibilities and made him the leading citizen of the town. By all accounts, he fulfilled his tasks with vigilance and fairness and was widely respected for his work. But he soon became disillusioned with the increasingly violent nature of the Revolution. He declined to stand for reelection in 1792 and gradually withdrew from politics.

After his marriage in 1793, he retired to Villeneuve, from then on dividing his time between the country and Paris. Fontanes had gone into exile in London, where he met Chateaubriand. Eventually, upon their return to Paris, Joubert and the two younger men collaborated on the magazine Mercure de France. Joubert would later help Chateaubriand with many passages of Le Génie du christianisme and give him financial help in times of trouble. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Joubert was surrounded by many of the most successful men and women in France, deeply admired for his lucid ideas, his sharp critical intelligence, and his enormous talent for friendship.

When he died in 1824 at the age of seventy, Chateaubriand, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, eulogized him in the Journal des débats: “He was one of those men you loved for the delicacy of his feelings, the goodness of his soul, the evenness of his temper, the uniqueness of his character, the keenness and brilliance of his mind—a mind that was interested in everything and understood everything. No one has ever forgotten himself so thoroughly and been so concerned with the welfare of others.”

Although Fontanes and Chateaubriand had both urged him to put together a book from his daily writings, Joubert resisted the temptation to publish. The first selection to appear in print, entitled Pensées, was compiled by Chateaubriand in 1838 and distributed privately among Joubert’s friends. Other editions followed, eliciting sympathetic and passionate essays by such diverse figures as Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold, who compared Joubert favorably to Coleridge and remarked that “they both had favorably an ardent impulse for seeking the genuine from nature an art they thought about, and an organ for truth on all matters they thought about, and an organ for finding it and recognising it when it was found.” Those early editions all divided Joubert’s writings into chapters with abstract headings such as “Truth,” “Literature,” “Family,” “Society,” and so on. It wasn’t until 1938, in a two-volume work prepared by André Beaunier for Gallimard, that Joubert’s writings were presented in the original order of their composition. I have drawn my selections for this book from the nine hundred tightly printed pages of Beaunier’s scrupulous edition.

No more than a tenth of Joubert’s work is included here. In choosing the entries, I have been guided above all by my own contemporary and idiosyncratic tastes, concentrating my attention on Joubert’s aesthetic theories, his “imaginary physics,” and passages of direct autobiographical significance. I have not included the lengthy reading notes that Joubert made during his study of various philosophers—Malebranche, Kant, Locke, and others—or the frequent references to writers of his time, most of whom are unknown to us today. For convenience and economy, I have eliminated the dates that precede each entry.

I first discovered Joubert’s work in 1971, through an essay written by Maurice Blanchot, “Joubert et L’espace.” In it, Blanchot compares Joubert to Mallarmé and makes a solid case for considering him to be the most modern writer of his period, the one who speaks most directly to us now. And indeed, the free-floating, questing nature of Joubert’s mind along with his concise and elegant style have not grown old with the passage of time. Everything is mixed together in the notebooks, and reflections on literature and philosophy are scattered among observations about the weather, the landscape, and politics. Entries of unforgettable psychological insight (“Those who never back down love themselves more than they love the truth”) alternate with brief, chilling comments on the turmoil around him (“Stacking the dead on top of one another”), which in turn are punctuated by sudden outbursts of levity (“They say that souls have no sex; of course they do”). The more you read Joubert, the more you want to go on reading him. He draws you in with his discretion and honesty, with his plainspoken brilliance, with his quiet but utterly original way of looking at the world.

At the same time, it is easy to ignore Joubert. He doesn’t point to himself or bang on loud ideas. Those of us who love him know him more as a treasure secret, but in the 164 years since his writings were first made available to the public, he has scarcely caused a ripple in the world at large. This translation was first published by Jack Shoemaker of North Point Press in 1983, and the book failed to arouse anything but indifference on the part of American critics and readers. The book received just one review (in The Boston Globe), and sales amounted to something in the neighborhood of eight hundred copies. On the other hand, not long after the book was published, Joubert’s relevance was brought home to me in a remarkable way. I gave a copy to one of my oldest friends, the painter David Reed. David had a friend who had recently landed in Bellevue after suffering a nervous breakdown, and when David went to visit him in the hospital, he left behind his copy of Joubert—on loan. Two or three weeks later, when the friend was finally released, he called David to apologize for not returning the book. After he had read it, he said, he had given it to another patient. That patient had passed it on to yet another patient, and little by little Joubert had made his way around the ward. Interest in the book became so keen that groups of patients would gather in the dayroom to read passages out loud to one another and discuss them. When David’s friend asked for the book back, he was told that it no longer belonged to him. “It’s our book,” one of the patients said. “We need it.” As far as I’m concerned, that is the most eloquent literary criticism I have ever heard, proof that the right book in the right place is medicine for the human soul. As Joubert himself once put it in 1801: “A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.”

P. A. August 11, 2002

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (excerpt)

1783(?)

Do you want to know how thought functions, to know its effects? Read the poets. Do you want to know about morality, about politics? Read the poets. What pleases you in them, deepen: it is the truth.

In order to write perfectly, one must write and think in the same way a perfect man would write and think at the moment when all the faculties of his being were in perfect harmony. This situation would be possible in some state of soul in which all the passions were developed in all their force and to their full extent and combined in perfect equilibrium.

What makes the waters consoling is their movement and their limpidity . . . .

When a nation gives birth to an individual capable of producing a great thought, another is born who is capable of understanding and admiring it.

If I die and leave several scattered thoughts on important things, I beg in the name of humanity that those who see what has been left suppress nothing that seems at odds with accepted ideas. During my life I loved only the truth. I feel I have seen it in many great things. Perhaps one of these [words?] that I have dashed off in haste . . .

1784

If the earth must perish, then astronomy is our only consolation.

1785

I imitate the dove, and often I throw a blade of grass to the drowning ant.

1786

If there is one sad thing in the world, it is the poplar on the mountains . . . .

Every sound in music must have an echo; every figure must have a sky in painting; and we who sing with thoughts and paint with words, every sentence and each word in our writings must also have its horizon and its echo.

Thoughts form in the soul in the same way clouds form in the air.

1787

A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.

Sad harvests . . .

The essential thing is not that there be many truths in a work, but that no truth be abused.

1789

It is not facts, but rumors that cause emotions among the people. What is believed creates everything.
Extension is the body of God, as Newton would readily say.

Mixture of dry and wet. Water swells before boiling.

1791

Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet?

A winter without cold and without fire.

The republic is the only cure for the ills of the monarchy, and the monarchy is the only cure for the ills of the republic.

. . . where the accusers are almost always the guilty ones.

The reading of Plato is like mountain air. It does not nourish, but it sharpens our faculties and gives us a taste for fine food.

Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.

In these times of trouble, one commits and suffers great evil.

We are in the world as words are in a book. Each generation is like a line, a phrase.

Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking.

1793

Wisdom is the strength of the weak.

His ink has the colors of the rainbow.

Let heaven forgive the wicked, after they have been punished.

In order to live, we need little life. In order to love, we need much.

It is necessary that something be sacred.

The good is worth more than the best.

What makes civil wars more murderous than other wars is that we can more easily accept having a stranger for an enemy than a neighbor; we do not want to keep the possibility of vengeance so near.

1794

Here is the desert. In this silence everything speaks to me: and in your noise everything falls silent.

***My son was born during the night of the 8th and 9th, at two and quarter hours past midnight.
That he one day remember the pains of his mother!

Big words. Claim too much attention.

All truths are double or doubled, or they all have a front and a back.

1795

These coups d’etat are necessary, you tell me. I answer you, what is sinister and criminal is never necessary at any time.

Children always want to look behind mirrors.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.

1796

The ancients knew about anatomy only through war. It was on the battlefields that they learned all they knew about it.

Passions come like a smallpox and disfigure this original beauty.

He must confess his darkness.

Give me a morality that equally suits the healthy and the sick, men and women, children, adults, and old people.

Everything that cannot grow diminishes, even the qualities that are passed on. Is this true?

The first part and last part of human life are what is best about it, or at least what is most respectable. The one is the age of innocence, the other is the age of reason. You must write for these two ages and banish from your mind and your books that which does not suit one or the other.

I love to see two truths at the same time. Every good comparison gives the mind this advantage.

… His necessity invincibly proves his existence.

Illusion is in sensations. Error is in judgments. We can know truth and at the same time take pleasure in illusion.

One loves to say what he knows, and the other to say what he thinks.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

The imagination is the eye of the soul.

There are truths that cannot be apprehended in conversation.

What comes through war is given back through war. All spoils will be retaken, all plunder will be dispersed. All victors will be defeated and every city filled with prey will be sacked in its turn.

Plato. He is an author whose ideas cannot be understood until they have become our own.

Take us back to the time when wine was invented . . .

The penchant for destruction is one of the ways used for conserving the world.

When a thought gives birth to obscurity, it must be rejected, renounced, abandoned.

1797

In order to be known, he would have to make us immortal and give us another life.

To compensate absence with memory.

A flower that cannot bloom, a bud that cannot open.

To seek wisdom rather than truth. It is more within our grasp.

Lovers. Whoever does not have their weaknesses cannot have their strenghts.

Clarity of mind is not given in all centuries.

We do not write our books in advance, we do them as we write them. What is best about our works is hidden by scaffoldings: our texts are filled with what must be kept and what must be left behind.

In metaphysics, the art of writing consists of making sensible and palpable what is abstract. To make abstract what is palpable is its vice and fault. It is the fault of those we have so mistakenly called metaphysicians in this century.

The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye.

Psalms. Read them with the intention of praying and you will find them beautiful. Eh! Doesn’t every reading demand a readiness of mind that is special and appropriate to it?

When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others.

God made life to be lived (the world to be inhabited) and not to be known.

The thoughts about which we can say: “There is rest in this thought.” This image is encouraging.

The dying inherit the dead.

All these philosophers are no more than surgeons.

Resignation is a hundred times easier than courage, for it has a motive outside of us and courage does not. If both diminish evil, let us the one that diminishes it the most. (Outside us, that is to say beyond our will.)

Remember to let your ink grow ripe.

Around every flame there must be a void, so there can be light. Without space, no light.

1798

The sign then makes us forget the thing signified.

What good is modesty? – It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.

Beauties that leave nothing to the imagination.

The only good in man is his young feelings and his old thoughts.

Stars more beautiful to the eye than to the telescope that robs them of their illusions.

In the same way that man was made in the image of God, the earth was made in the image of heaven.

. . . Pleasure of being seen from afar.

A century in which the body has become subtle, in which the mind has become coarse.

Among the trhee extensions, we must include time, space, and silence. Space is in time, silence is in space.

To be in one’s place, to be at one’s post, to be part of the order, to be content. Not to murmur of suffering, to be incapable of being unhappy.

Too much talk (they say). Nota bene: too much writing.

It is impossible to love the same person twice.

1799

Like Daedalus, I am forging myself wings. I construct them little by little, adding one feather each day.

Illusion or play. Everything agreeable is in them.

When you want transparency, the finite, the smooth and the beautiful, you must polish for a long time.

Lions, bulls; images of strength are everywhere, whereas images of wisdom are nowhere.

We must treat our lives as we treat our writings, put them in accord, give harmony to the middle, the end, and the beginning. In order to do this we must make many erasures.

Dreams of love. Those of ambition. The dreams of piety.

Arrival of Bonaparte.

Old men, when neglected, have no more wisdom.

1800

Each man thinks not what he has been told but what he understands.

The word, in fact, is disembodied thought.

Antiquity. I prefer ruins to reconstructions.

It would be difficult to be scorned and to live virtuously. We have need of support.

All ardent people have something mad about them, and all cold people have something stupid.

Analysis: in morality, in cooking.

Descartes’s noises. His physics has too much commotion. Newton’s offers a more silent world, but too naked, too lifeless.

He who has the abstract idea of a thing understands it; but only he who can make it understood is able to make it imaginable. Yes.

There are truths that instruct, perhaps, but they do not illuminate. In this class are all the truths of reasoning.

The old age of men resembles their childhood. Without exception.

We are worth more when someone looks at us. And, because of this, an eye is always watching us.

Let us remember this. – What? – That it is not the sun in the sky that we see, but the sun at the back of our retina.

To know: it is to see inside oneself.

Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.

Leibnitz and Spinoza. – The realm of abstractions. The first offers its perfection, the second nothing but its flaws.

To analyze, to deconstruct. – What they so emphatically call analysis is what we would call division when speaking simply.

If prayer does not change our destiny, it changes our feelings – which is no less useful.

How admiration contributes to the peace of the human mind and is necessary to it.

Every house: temple, empire, school.

In our writings thought seems to move like a man who is walking straight ahead. On the other hand, in the writings of the ancients, thought seems to move like a bird that glides and advances by turning round and round.

Everything seems naked to eyes that have never seen without veils. Nothing can please them for very long.

1801

History, like perspective, has need of distance.

Close your eyes and you will see.

Vision is made by the joining of two lights. – Add. March 19: And if objects shine toward us, we shine toward objects.

Christianity. We cannot speak against it without anger, nor speak for it without love.

It is the bell that moves, but you who ring. It is the sun that shines, but you who see. The nourishment is in the meat, but the taste is in you. Fire gives or creates warmth, but it is you who feel it.
Harmony is in the one who listens: yes, as effect; but not as cause.

I like Leibnitz’s expression the soul carries the body. And observe that everywhere and in everything, what is subtle carries what is compact; and what is light holds in suspension all that is heavy. Admit it, at least in the sense of – and as the most beautiful conception of the human mind.

This stone in my hand, it demands glory.

A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.

Too seek the truth. But, as you are seeking and as you are waiting, what will you do, what will you think, what will you practice, what rules must you follow?

The spectacle has changed, but our eyes are the same.

Everything beautiful is indeterminate.

Beautiful works. Genius begins them, but labor alone finishes them.

Of the unfortunate need to please oneself.

Newton. How ripe his apple was.

It seems more difficult to me to be a modern than to be an ancient.

1802

Floods of passions. It would nevertheless be better to raise the dikes for them.

From this day forward, to give up Locke, and to agree never to read another word he has written.

The only thing Newton invented was the how much.

The things we believe are difficult to conceive of because it is difficult to talk about them.

In fact everything (according to Descartes) happens through figure and movement. That is the fixed point from which his mind proceeded to all its operations, the result of his explanations. That is his doctrine, summed up in a few words. Goodbye, Descartes!

You say that books are soon read, but they are not soon understood. To digest them, etc. To understand a beautiful or great thought perhaps requires the same amount of time it takes to have it, to conceive of it. To penetrate a thought and to produce a thought are almost the same action.

Piety is a cure.

Imagined harmonies. If they are not a physical fact, they are at least a human fact, and because of that, a reality.

If superior intelligence wanted to give an account of human things to the inhabitants of heaven and to give an exact idea of them, he would express himself like Homer.

I pass my life chasing after butterflies – considering the ideas that conform to generally held ideas as good, and the others simply as mine.

That is true, a king without a religion always seems a tyrant.

The revolution chased my mind from the real world by making the world too horrible for me.

It is even easier to be wrong about truth than about beauty.

It seems that Plato has too much and that there is too little in Aristotle. From which, in the first, an abundance carried to superfluity, and in the other a precision or brevity that leads to obscurity.

Speak more softly to be better heard by a deaf public.

To call everything by its name.

Illusion based on reality, that is the secret of the fine arts – in fact, all of art.

We speak to ourselves in metaphors. We are naturally led to it as a method of better understanding ourselves and of retaining our thoughts more easily – which we then label in a kind of container.
“In a container of light.” Y.

There are only two kinds of beautiful writing, that which has a great fullness of sound, meaning, soul, warmth, and life, and that which has a great transparency.

We have it in our soul, but we hardly ever put into our life what we put into our writings.

In every piece of music, not everything is music, and in every poem not everything is poetry.

The first act of a man who finds God displeasing is to say to himself: I must arrange the world without him.

Imagining is good, provided you do not believe you see what can only be imagined.

Lost spirit. Judges without justice, priests without religion.

Sensibility that comes from the nerves. Opinions have a great influence on it and can led to cruelty. Examples in the revolution.

(At the baths.) Piety defends us from ourselves; modesty defends us from others.

(5 in the morning. Insomnia.) Everything must have its sky. To be put everywhere.

All beautiful words are susceptible to more than one meaning (or signification).

The phrase: “One dies because one has lived.”

Sad science that teaches blind men to speak of light and colors and that persuades them they can even make judgments about these things.

1803

Nothing is more difficult for children than reflection. That is because the last and essential destination of the soul is seeing, is knowing, and not reflecting. Reflection is one of the labors of life, a means of getting somewhere, a path, a passage, and not a center. Everything always tends towards its final destination. To know and be known, these are the two points of rest. This will be the happiness of souls.

. . . but in the end a year comes when you find that you are getting old.

To know how to walk in the night, to have a goal, to reach it in the darkness, the shadows.

Everything is made through images. They enter us through all the other senses, as through the eye. An echo (they say) is an image of the voice. All our affections are produced by images of touching. Our whole body is a mirror.

Someone said of an asthmatic who was being very sweet and patient in his suffering. “One would like to breathe for him.”

Everything must be precise in it and yet nothing should be too tight.

. . . because, what must be put in the work and what must be left out is infinite.

The thoughts that come to us are worth more than the ones we seek.

To know what one must forbid oneself.

Chateaubriand. We inhabit the same regions but we do not bring back the same curiosities.

What we write with difficulty is written with more care, engraves itself more deeply.

All nightingales do not sing equally well, nor do all roses smell the same.

Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes.

It is difficult for me to leave Paris because I must separate myself from my friends; and difficult for me to leave the country because I must separate myself from myself.

The silence of the pen and its advantages. Force builds up in it. Precision must flow out of it. A chatterer fallen quiet. When silence comes from force, it should make itself felt in discourse. What is hasty would be bad upon reflection. – To know how to write – to be capable of not writing.

Everything has its poetry.

To write, not only with few words, but with few thoughts.

Two sorts of truths. I. what must be thought, II: what must be done.

They speak to the ear, I want to speak to the memory.

Attention is sustained (in poetry) by the amusement of the ear. Prose does not have this advantage. Might it have? I try. But I think not.

1804

Then there comes into languages a facility and an overabundance that, if you want to become a great writer, you must oppose with difficulties, with a sure taste, a meditated choice. When you find a torrent, obstacles must be places in it.

Strength in organization and weakness in carrying out the material. Like an automaton whose elasticity would be exquisite if the wood were not too thin or too fragile.
There I am: a flattering self-portrait

To survive one’s passions and not one’s strengths. Happy.

It is beautiful enough to be seen, but not to be dreamed.

God. There are many things that should be left in life and not put into books.

It is a key; what difference if it is golden or iron? It can open things.

When the author speaks to himself instead of speaking to the reader.

These thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life.

I wanted to bypass words, I disdained them: words have had their revenge – through difficulty, etc.

To the question: is he guilty? must be added another question: is he incorrigible?

The time I once lost in pleasure I now lose in suffering.

When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.

1805

Those thoughts that come to us suddenly and that are not yet ours.

For simple light is perhaps still more beautiful than colors.

Glory. Lovelier to desire than to possess.

All things that are easy to say have already been perfectly said.

To judge things of taste, we must give ourselves time to taste them.

The soul speaks to itself in parables.

All grace (decor) comes from patience. And, consequently, from some force exerted on itself.

We are afraid of having and showing a small mind and we are not afraid of having and showing a small heart.

One ruins the mind with too much writing. – One rusts it by not writing at all.

One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them. One must know how to leave one’s own ideas and how to come back to them.

In everything mathematical there is something imperishable, because there is nothing living.

A drop of light is worth more than an ocean of darkness: is worth more, I say, be it given or received.

What man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm.

Terrestrial by birth, celestial by origin, only our body is of this world.

1806

I don’t like to write anything down on paper that I would not say to myself.

The important business of man is life, and the important business of life is death.

To descend into ourselves, we must first lift ourselves up.

Illusions come from heaven and mistakes come from us.

Tacitus. And all those words that are obscure only once.

– in these times when, to express ourselves well, we must speak in a way the others do not.

. . . burdened with the unbearable weight of ourselves.

Facility is the enemy of great things.

Undoubtedly, philosophy caused the Revolution. But what caused philosophy? Theological arrogance.

Those who never back down love themselves more than they love the truth.

There must be several voices together in one voice for it to be beautiful. And several meanings in one word for it to be beautiful.

It is through the flesh that we judge what is hard and what is soft.

I stop when I see no more light; it is impossible for me to write by feeling my way.

– for wine is a wet fire.

1807

. . . all the pleasures it does not bless (religion).

Why in language and in the course of all violent passions there is always something familiar and naive.

Beauty is something animal, the beautiful is something celestial.

Little people have few passions, they hardly have anything but needs.

Speak for the ear and write for the memory.

Great minds are those that disguise their limits, that mask their mediocrity.

The first poets or writers made madmen wise. The last seek to make wise men mad.

When the last word is always the one that offers itself first, the work becomes difficult.

Heaven gave strength to my mind only for a time – and this time has passed.

Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.

A nail, to hang his thoughts on.

1808

I am like Montaigne: “unsuited to continuous discourse.”

Wicked people have nothing human about them except passions: they are almost their virtues.

To be tragic, misfortunes must be rare.

– maxims, because what is isolated can be seen better.

To finish! What a word. We finish nothing when we stop, when we say we have come to the end.

What makes us look for a long time is that we do not look where we should or that we look where we should not. But how to look where we should when we do not even know what we are looking for? And this is what always happens when we compose and when we create. Fortunately, by straying in this fashion, we make more than one discovery, we have good encounters, and often are repaid for what we have looked for without finding by what we have found without looking for.

Here I am outside civil things, in the pure region of Art.

Necessity can make a doubtful action innocent, but it cannot make it commendable.

-and the pernicious habit of accepting pleasures without gratitude.

To be the soul of a body, but not the head, that is a noble ambition.

Sloth waiting for inspiration.

The breadth of the mind is attention.

The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

Animals love the people who talk to them.

The republic of ants and the monarchy of bees.

If we exclude the idea of God, it is impossible to have an exact idea of virtue.

Voltaire had the soul of a monkey and the mind of an angel.

Freedom. The freedom to do something well. There is no need of any other kind.
Truths. The truths that teach us to act well and to live well. There is no need of any other kind.

Abuse of words, foundation of ideology.

The punishment of those who have loved women too much is to love them forever.

Tenderness is the repose of passion.

1809

– because the sublime gives a useful pleasure.

Whoever consults the light within himself (it is in everyone) excels at judging the objects this light illuminates.

The ellipsis, favorable to brevity, saves time and space.

A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.

He must not only cultivate his friends, but cultivate his friendships within himself. They must be kept, cared for, watered.

1810

All cries and all complaints exhale a vapor, and from this vapor a cloud is formed, and from these heaped-up clouds come thunder, storms, the inclemencies that destroy everything.

Let’s go; and follow your mistake.

Anger, which purges resentment.

1812

To let the reader sometimes complete the symmetry between words and to do no more than suggest it.

Ash Wednesday.
The face. After the face, action. Between the two, attitudes. But before everything, the idea.

Having found nothing worth more than emptiness, he leaves space vacant.

When I had the strength, I did not have the patience. I have the patience today and I no longer have the power.

– and to destroy my memory by my presence.

Poetry made with little matter: with leaves, with grains of sand, with air, with nothings, etc.

Of those who have a muse and those who have only their soul.

1813

Silence. – Joys of silence. – Thoughts must be born from the soul and words from silence. – An attentive silence.

In political institutions, almost everything we call an abuse was once a remedy.

“Leave behind endless hope and vast thoughts,” says the poet. I no longer have vast thoughts.

In order to know men, something must be chanced. Who risks nothing of himself knows nothing.

There are, following Plato’s idea, souls that not only do not have wings but do not even have feet (for progress or consistency) or hands (for work).

Egregie fallitur. He is wrong, but nobly, intelligently, with grace, with spirit, with wisdom and much beauty.

There is a residue of wisdom (as there is a residue of madness); and in human wisdom this residue purified by old age is perhaps the best thing we have.

A frightening thing, which is perhaps true: “oldmen want to survive.”

People that have overthrown geography ( like winds, storms, and torrents).

I can do something well only slowly and with great effort.
Our moments of light are all moments of happiness.
When it is bright in our mind, the weather is good.

1814

Nothing is better than a justified enthusiasm.

What leads us astray in morality is an excessive love of pleasure; and what stops us or holds us back in metaphysics is a love of certainty.

More than once I have brought the cup of abundance to my lips; but it is a water that has always escaped me, (Another version: I have often brought to my lips the cup that holds abundance; it is a water that has always escaped me.)

Almost all men prefer danger to fear. Some prefer death to danger and to pain. This is because fear, danger, and pain disturb reason. The horse throws himself into the precipice to escape the spur.

In literature, beauty must not be fabricated.

Let us look for our lights in our feelings. There is a warmth in them that contains many clarities.

Fire, ignition, and brightness; the body, its shadow and penumbra; sound, echo, and half-echo: everything has some shadow, some glow or reverberation. (Reflection.)

Neither in the arts, nor in logic, nor in life should an idea in any way be treated as a thing.

There is nothing perfectly true for man; I mean in human opinions. Just as there is nothing perfectly round.

Our life is of woven wind.

To speak to God of everything; to dare to question him and to be attentive to what he says about everything. But sometimes we take our own voice for that of God.

Retreat often into your sphere, rest yourself in your center, plunge yourself into your element: good advice, which must be remembered.

Of the sincerity of things. To see it. Truth consists of this.

1815

I confess that I am like an aeolian harp – which gives off some pretty sounds but can play no songs.

Too much harmony. Prose can have too much of it; also too much sweetness. And this is a very seductive fault, at first very agreeable, but unbearable and ridiculous over the long term.
Varnish (in style) makes a glaze (for the reader).

Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.

You go to truth by way of poetry and I come to poetry by way of truth.

What is pleasing always has something chanced about it.

Without fixed ideas, no fixed feelings.

When we find what we have been looking for, we don’t have time to say it. We must die.

All foods are in fact good for someone who is hungry, but not for someone who has no appetite.

Leave dreams of the imagination time to evaporate.

France destroyed by its philosophers.

It is not light that burns, that purifies, that consumes, that divides, and that recomposes: it is fire. And this fire we are talking about always follows light.

Of what must be said and what must not be said. The importance of knowing.

Old age and its mask.

When you no longer love what is beautiful, you can no longer write.

1816

Plato. The poetic spirit that gives life to the languors of his dialectic. He is lost in the void; but we can see his wings beating, we can hear their noise. His imitators lack these wings.

1818

You want to talk to someone: first open your ears.

I am an aeolian harp. No wind has passed through me.

Then, God withdrew his forces into himself, and we grew old.

If you want to think well, to write well, to act well, first make a “place” for yourself, a “true place”. Because we lack true places, we put our thoughts outside the true light and our conduct outside order.

1819

Happy is the man who can do only one thing: in doing it, he fulfills his destiny.

Don Quixote going to Tobosa and talking to Sancho as Socrates did to his disciples; and this is not ridiculous and does not even seem out of place.

Because they know all the words, they think they know all the truths.

There are things we can speak of only in writing, that we cannot know except when thinking of writing them down, and that we cannot, however, think of writing except when we know them in advance.

1823

And perhaps there is no advice to give a writer more important than this: – Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure.

Spaces . . . I would almost say . . . imaginary, existence is so much in them, etc.

1824

Nota. – The true – the beautiful = the just – the holy

Emil M. Cioran – Suze i sveci

El Greco, Christ driving the Traders from the Temple

Hoću li ikada biti toliko čist da se odrazim u suzama svetaca?

Čudna je pomisao da je više svetaca živjelo u isto vrijeme. Pokušavam zamisliti njihov susret, ali nemam dovoljno žara ni mašte. U pedeset i drugoj godini slavna i obožavana, Terezija Avilska srela je u Medini del Campo nepoznatog i strastvenog svetog Ivana od Križa, tada starog dvadeset i pet godina! Španjolska mistika božanski je trenutak u povijesti čovječanstva.

Tko bi mogao napisati razgovor svetaca? Jedan ludo nevin Shakespeare ili jedan Dostojevski prognan u neki nebeski Sibir? Cijeli ću život lutati predjelima svetaca…

Muzika mi je dala preveliku hrabraost pred Bogom. To me udaljava od istočnjačkih mistika…

Na Posljednjem sudu vagat će se samo suze.

Druženje sa svecima jednako je kao i druženje s muzikom i bibliotekama. Bespolni, svoje nagone stavljamo u službu jednog drugog svijeta. Ako odolijevamo svetosti, dokazujemo da su naši nagoni dobro.

Kad život izgubi svoj prirodni pravac, traži neki drugi. To objašnjava zašto je nebesko plavetnilo tako dugo bilo mjesto najvećeg lutanja…

“Ne vidim razliku između suza i muzike” (Nietzsche)

Tko to nije otprve shvatio muzika mu nikada nije bila bliska. Svaka prava muzika nastala je iz plača, jer se rađa iz žala za rajem.

Do početka XVIII. stoljeća bilo je u izobilju “rasprava o savršenstvu”. Oni koji su se zaustavili na putu svetosti tješili su se pisanjem, tako da je stoljećima savršenstvo bilo opsesija neuspjelih svetaca. Oni drugi, uspjeli sveci, više se nisu njime bavili, oni su ga već imali.

Smrt ima smisla samo za one koji su strasno voljeli život. Umrijeti a nemati što napustiti! Rastanak je negacija života, baš kao i smrti. Tko je pobijedio strah od smrti pobijedio je i strah od života, jer život je samo drugo ime za taj strah.

Kad je skladao Mesiju, Händel se sve vrijeme osjećao kao da je prenesen na nebo. Sâm je priznao da se spustio na zemlju tek kad je dovršio svoje djelo. Ipak, u usporedbi s Bachom, Händel je s ovoga svijeta. Ono što je kod Bacha božansko, kod Händela je herojsko. Zemaljsko prostranstvo tipična je hendlovska nota: preobrazba izvana.

Orgulje izražavaju unutarnji drhtaj Boga. Stapajući se s njihovim vibracija, mi nestajemo u Njemu.

Job, kozmičke tužaljke i žalosne vrbe… Otvorene rane prirode i duše… A ljudsko srce – otvorena rana Boga.

Svaki oblik ekstaze zamjena je za seksualnost, koja bez osrednjosti bića ne bi imala nikakva smisla. No, kako bića nemaju drugog načina da izađu iz sebe, seksualnost ih privremeno spašava. Taj čin nadilazi svoje osnovno značenje – on je pobjeda nad animalnošću, jer na psihološkoj razini seksualnost su jedina vrata otvorena u nebo.

Hoću li ikad uspjeti prestati citirati samo Boga? Ljudi, pa ni sami sveci nemaju imena. Ima ga samo Bog. Ali što mi znamo o Njemu, osim da je On očaj koji počinje tamo gdje završavaju sva ostala?

Samo bi me raj ili more mogli odvratiti od bijega u muziku.

Tuge bacaju na dušu sjenu samostana. Tada počinjemo razumjeti svece… Koliko god nas htjeli pratiti do kraja naše boli, ne mogu – i tako nas ostavljaju na pola puta, usred gorčina i kajanja.

Bolesti su približile nebo i zemlju. Bez njih, oni ne bi znali jedno za drugo. Potreba za utjehom prestigla je bolest i u stjecištu neba i zemlje stvorila svetost.

Tko pobijedi strah može se smatrati besmrtnim; tko ga nema, besmrtan je. Možda i u raju bića nestaju, ali kako ne poznaju strah od smrti, ona zapravo nikada ne umiru. Strah je smrt svakoga trenutka.

Stvarna, izvanjska smrt za Rilkea nema nikakvog značenja. Ni za Novalisa. Uostalom, koji je pjesnik umro samo jedanput?

Vjerujemo u Boga samo da izbjegnemo mučni monolog samoće. Kome se drugome obratiti? On, čini se, rado prihvaća dijalog i ne ljuti se što smo ga izabrali kao teatralni izgovor za naše slabosti.

Prihvatio sam privide kad sam shvatio da apsolut postoji samo u odricanju.

Pošto je iscrpio sadržaj vječnosti, srednji vijek nam je dao pravo da volimo prolazne stvari.

Kršćanstvo je samo kriza suza od kojih nam ostaje gorak okus.

Pred kraj srednjeg vijeka pojavilo se mnogo anonimnih napisa naslovljenih “Umijeće umiranja”. Doživjeli su neviđen uspjeh. Može li takva tema dan danas nekoga dirnuti?

U antičko doba ljudi su znali umirati. Vječni ideal njihove mudrosti bio je izdignuti se iznad smrti. A nama, smrt je strašno iznenađenje.

Kad smo uništili svijet i ostali sami, ponosni na svoje djelo, kao posljednje iskušenje javlja se Bog, suparnik NIštavila.

S renesansom započinje pomrčina rezignacije. Otuda tragična aureola modernog čovjeka. Stari su prihvaćali svoju sudbinu. Moderan čovjek nije se ponizio takvom povlasticom. Podjednako nam je stran i prezir prema sudbini. Jer nemamo dovoljno mudrosti da s bolnom strašću zavolimo sudbinu.

Biti obuzet svetošću; bolest suzbijati bolešću. Hoću li imati dovoljno muzike u sebi da nikad ne nestanem? Nakon nekih adagia nemoguće je istrunuti.

Neki se još uvijek pitaju ima li život smisla ili nema. Što se zapravo svodi na pitanje je li podnošljiv ili nije. Tu prestaju problemi i počinju rješenja.

Shakespeare i Dostojevski ostavljaju vam žal što niste svetac ili zločinac. Dva načina samouništenja…

Muziku nosimo u sebi: ona počiva u dubokim slojevima sjećanja. Sve muzičko stvar je reminiscencije. Sigurno smo sve čuli još u vrijeme kad nismo imali imena.

Regresijom u pamćenje postajete metafizičar, vraćanjem na početke, svetac.

Velika Nietzscheova zasluga je u tome što se na vrijeme znao obraniti od svetosti. Što bi bilo od njega da je dao maha svojim prirodnim sklonostima? Pascal sa svim ludilom svetaca k tome.

Filozofi imaju hladnu krv. Topline ima samo u blizini Boga. Zbog svega sibirskog u sebi, naša priroda traži svece.

Lako se osloboditi filozofskog nasljeđa, jer se korijeni filzoofije zaustavljaju na našim nesigurnostima, dok korijeni svetosti sežu u dubine same patnje. Skepticizam je vrhunac hrabrosti filozofije. Iznad njega, ona vidi samo kaos.

Filozof bježi od osrednjosti samo uz pomoć skepticizma ili misticizma, dva oblika očaja pred spoznajom. Misticizam je bijeg od spoznaje, skepticizam je spoznaja bez nade. U svakom slučaju može se reći da svijet nije rješenje.

Zanimaju nas samo oni filozofi koji su se, ogorčeni sistemima, dali u potragu za srećom. Tako nastaju sumračne filozofije, utješnije od religija jer nas oslobađaju svih zabrana. Iz njih izvire blagi umor; kao kolijevka nesigurnosti, tako potrebna poslije nezdravoga druženja sa svecima.

Jedina zasluga filozofa je u tome što su s vremena na vrijeme pocrvenjeli od stida zato što su ljudi. Platon i Nietzsche su iznimke: oni se nikada nisu prestali stidjeti. Prvi nas je pokušao oteti svijetu, drugi navesti da izađemo iz sebe samih. Obojica bi mogli učiti svece. Tako je spašena čast filozofije.

Kad istina ne bi bila tako dosadna, znanost bi brzo Boga bacila u ropotarnicu. Ali Bog je, baš kao i sveci, prilika da pobjegnemo od nepodnošljive banalnosti istinitog.

Da nije to predosjećaja noći, koja je Bog, život bi bio čarobni suton.

Zbog svog besprijekornog savršenstva, sveti Franjo Asiški mi je tuđ. Ne nalazim mu nijedne slabe točke koja bi mi ga približila i omogućila mi da ga razumijem. Njegovo savršenstvo gotovo je neoprostivo. Mislim da sam mu ipak pronašao opravdanje. Kad je na kraju života gotovo potpuno oslijepio, liječnici su njegovu bolest pripisali samo jednom uzroku: previše suza.

El Greco, Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy

Svetost je prekoračenje položaja ljudskog bića. Želja da se bude u Bogu više se ne miri sa životom pored ili ispod, što označava naš pad.

Kad u nama utihne neki muzički motiv, zamijeni ga bezgranična praznina. Na granicama zvučnog zanosa, božanstvo će nam najbolje otkriti unutarnja multiplikacija – prisjećanjem – neke Bachove fuge. Kad se sjetimo nekog motiva i njegove uzlazne groznice, uletimo ravno u božansko. Muzika je krajnja emanacija univerzuma, kao što je Bog krajnja emanacija muzike.

Potišten zbog samoće materije, On je isplakao oceane i mora. Otuda tajanstveni zov morskih prostranstava i iskušenje da konačno uronimo, kao da se konačno okrećemo Njemu…

Ona čije ganuće pred nebesima i morima nije dotaknulo suzu, taj nije pohodio nemirne predjele božanstva, gdje je samoća tolika da zaziva drugu, još veću.

Prezirem kršćanina jer je u stanju izbliza voljeti sebi slične. Da ponovno otkrijem čovjeka trebala bi mi Sahara.

Kako nema rješenja ni za koji problem niti izlaza ni iz koje situacije, samo se vrtimo u krugu. Misli hranjenje patnjom poprimaju oblik aporije, tog chiaroscura duha. Terete nerješivog baca tamnu sjenu na stvari. Neizlječiva ozbiljnost sutona…

Mistika je proboj apsoluta u historiju. Ona je, jednako kao i muzika, nimbus svake kulture, njezina posljednja potvrda.

Svi su se nihilisti obračunavali s Bogom. Dokaz više da On nije dalko od ničega. Pošto ste zgazili sve, ostalo vam je samo da uništite i tu zadnju zalihu ništavila.

Kad god naš umor od svijeta poprimi religiozni oblik, Bog je more kojemu se predajemo da zaboravimo sebe. Uranjanje u božanski bezdan spašava nas od iskušenja da budemo što jesmo.

Ponekad Ga otkrivamo kao svjetlo na kraju unutarnje regresije, što će nas mnogo manje utješiti jer, nalazeći Ga u sebi ,na neki Ga način imamo. Imamo pravo na Njega, jer pristanak koji mu dajemo ne prelazi dimenzije iluzije.

Bog kao i more i Bog kao svjetlo smjenjuju se u našem doživljaju božanskog. U oba slučaja jedini cilj je zaborava, neprovratni zaborav.

Kad slušate Bacha, vidite kako niče Bog. Njegovo je djelo tvorac božanstva.

Nakon jednog oratorija, kantate ili Pasije On mora postojati. Inače bi cjelokupni Kantorov opus bio bolna iluzija.

…Kad pomislite da su toliki teolozi i filozofi izgubili dane i noći u traženju dokaza o postojanju Boga, zaboravljajući postojanje samo…

Ideja Boga najpraktičnija je i najopasnija ikada začeta ideja. S njom se čovječanstvo spašava ili propada.

“Apsolut” je otapalo u krvi.

Religija je smiješak koji lebdi nad općim besmislom, poput zadnjeg mirisa na valu ništavila. Uostalom, zato se religija zadovoljava suzama. Još samo one mogu održati makar malo ravnoteže između svijeta i postojanja Boga. Kad suze presuše, nestat će i želja za Bogom.

U bîti, postojimo samo On i ja. Ali njegova šutnja poništava obojicu. Lako je moguće da nikada ništa nije bilo.

Mogu umrijeti mirne savjesti jer više ništa ne očekujem od njega. Naš nas je susret još više osamio. Svaki je život dodatni dokaz ništavnosti Boga.

Ponekad nam se dogodi da zažalimo što više ne znamo što znači religiozni strah. Kad bismo barem mogli u sebi oživjeti drhtaj predaka pred nepoznatim, stravu pred nerazumljivim!

Pokloniti se mudrosti znači uskladiti se s univerzalnim ritmom, kozmičkim silama, to znači sve znati i prilagoditi se svijetu, ništa više. Svi mudraci zajedno ne vrijede jedne kletve kralja Leara ili jedne tlapnje Ivana Karamazova. Stoicizam kao praktička i teorijska potvrda mudrosti najplitkije je i najlakše što možemo zamisliti. Ima li većeg poroka duha od rezignacije?

Kad bih bio umoran od života, on bi bio moje jedino utočište; ali dokle god uspijevam mučit samoga sebe, ne mogu ga ostaviti na miru.

Što nas On više zaokuplja, to više gubimo nevinost. U raju nitko nije mario za njega. Pad, samo je pad donio tu neobičnu radoznalost. Bez krivice nema svijesti o postojanju božanstva. Jednako rijetko nalazimo Boga u svijesti koja ne poznaje strahote grijeha.

Opsjednutost božanstvom istiskuje zemaljsku ljubav. Ne može se istovremeno strastveno ljubiti ženu i Boga. Sparivanje dviju neukrotivih erotika stvara beskonačno kolebanje. Jedna žena može nas izbaviti od Boga, baš kao što nas Bog može osloboditi svih žena.

Kad pokušam misliti što bi me još moglo približiti Bogu osjetim kako se val sažaljenja penje do njegovih napuštenih visina. Valjalo bi nešto učiniti za tog velikog Osamljenika.

Sažalijevati Njega: krajnja osamljenost ljudskog bića.

Svaka je verzija Boga autobiografska. Ona nije samo potekla od nas, nego je i naša vlastita interpretacija. To je udvojena introspekcija koja nam razotkriva život duše kao ja i kao Bog. Mi se odražavamo u njemu i on se odražava u nema.

Sebe zamišljam samo kroz sliku koju sam stvorio o njemu. Samo na taj način poznavanje sebe može imati smisao i cilj. Tko ne misli na Boga samome je sebi stranac. Jer jedini put u poznavanje sebe prolazi kroz Boga, a Historija svijeta samo je opis oblika koje je On poprimio.

Muzička meditacija obično bi trebala biti prototip misli. Koji je filozof ikada pojmio neki motiv sasvim do kraja, do njegove krajnje granice? Sveobuhvatna misao postoji samo u muzici. Poslije najvećih filozofa osjećamo potrebu da počnemo od nule. Samo nam muzika daje konačne odgovore.

Od svih ljudi heroj je onaj koji najmanje misli na smrt. Međutim, nitko ju ne želi, doduše nesvjesno, toliko kao on. Taj paradoks određuje njegovo stanje: uživa u umiranju bez osjećaja smrti.

Tko se više približio Njemu od El Greca svojim crtama i bojama? Jeli i sam Bog ikada bio s tako napadnom upornošću okružen ljudskim likovima? El Grecov oval nije optička greška, nego oblik ljudskog lica koje se izdužuje u visine. Nama je Španjolska plamen, Bogu požar. Vatra je zahvatila zemaljske i nebeske pustinje. Rusija s cijelim Sibirom – gori istovremeno kad i Španjolska, kad i samo nebo. Najskeptičniji Rus ili Španjolac strastvenije vole Boga nego bilo koji njemački metafizičar. Sav chiaroscuro holandskog slikarstva ne može se mjeriti s dramatičnom snagom goruće sjene jednog El Greca ili Zurbarana.

El Greco, The feast in the house of Simon

Sa svom svojom tajanstvenošću, holandski chiaroscuro ne zna što je transcendencija. Možda je melankolija otporna na apsolut.

Postoji li u umjetnosti drugo mjerilo osim približavanja nebu? Jer se traženi žar i napetost mogu odrediti samo u odnosu na apsolutnu strast. To nas mjerilo ipak ne može utješiti, jer nam Rusija i Španjolska pokazuju da nikada nismo dovoljno blizu Bogu da bismo stekli pravo biti ateisti…

Vrijeme je utjeha. Ali svijest svladava vrijeme. A teško je naći uspješno liječenje od svijesti. Bolest je sve što negira vrijeme. Ono najzdravije i najčišće u životu samo je apoteoza prolaznosti. Vječnost je neiscrpno truljenje, a Bog je leš nad kojim se razmeće čovjek.

Slučajno ste ušli u neku crkvu, nezainteresirano pogledali oko sebi, kad odjednom iznenade akordi orgulja; ili ste uvečer ušli u neku kuću zasjenjenu tragovima dima i začuli sjetni violončelo, ili pak u duo dosadno poslijepodne čuli kako se iz flaute krune note – možete li zamisliti zavodljiviju usamljenost?

Kod El Greca likovi i boje plamte okomito. I kod Van Gogha su predmeti buktinja a boje plamte. Ali vodoravno, rašireni u prostoru. Van Gogh je El Greco bez neba, El Greco bez onoga svijeta. U umjetnosti je uvijek, osim formalne strukture i različitih stilova, centar gravitacije unutrašnja atmosfera… Kod El Greca svijet juri prema BOgu, dok se kod Van Gogha razgaljuje u požaru…

U sjeni samostana prigušena tuga rađala je u duši redovnika onu prazninu koju je srednji vijek nazvao acedija. To gađenje, nastalo u pustinji srca i okamini svijeta, vjerski je spleen. To nije gađenje prema Bogu, nego dosada u Bogu. Acedija u sva nedjeljna popodneva provedena u teškoj tišini samostana.

U prvome zanosu, ekstaza sama sebi stvara pejzaž; acedija ga izobličuje, prirodu čini beživotnom, život otužnim, i stvara zatrovanu čamotinju koju možemo razumjeti samo zato što smo smrtnici lišeni milosti. Moderna acedija više nije samostanska samoća – premda svatko od nas u duši nosi samostan – nego praznina i strah pred nemoćnim i napuštenim Bogom.

Sva zvona zovu na Sud. Nakon tolikih stoljeća ona najavljuju svršetak zakriljujući svojom svečanošću agoniju u koju nas zove kršćanstvo. Kad njihov zov odjekne u vama, zreli ste za Sud, a ako im je zvuk napukao, presuda je neopoziva.

Uvijek su voljeli suze, nevinost i nihilizam. Bića koja znaju sve i ona koja ne znaju ništa. To su poraženi i djeca.

Poraz je vrhunac jasnoće; svijet postaje proziran neumoljivom oku onoga koji se, jalov i vidovit, više ničemu ne priklanja. Čak i kad je neobrazovan, poraženi zna sve, on vidi kroz stvari, on razotkriva i poništava cjelokupno stvaranje. Poraženi je La Rochefoucauld bez duha.

Nitko kao Majstor Eckhart nije dogurao tako daleko sa željom da poništi svoje prirodne nagone. Pomanjkanje potpune privrženosti stvaranju odvelo ga je u onaj Abgeschiedenheit, onu osamu koja je bitan uvjet predanosti Bogu. Između života i vječnosti on bez oklijevanja žrtvuje život, potvrđujući u teoriji i praksi bolnu razliku između tih dvaju svršetaka.

Zašto smo po svaku cijenu htjeli nešto dodati Propovjedniku kad već sadrži sve? Ili još bolj, zabluda je ono čega nema kod Propovjednika, “Zato se moje srce okrenulo očaju.” Istini.

“Mnogo mudrusti – mnogo jada; što više znanja, toviše boli.” (Prop. 18)

Propovjednik je izlaganjae, otkrivanje istina kojima se život, krivac za sve “isprazno”, krajnjom žestinom opire.

“Patnja je jedini razlog savjesti” (Dostojevski). Ljudi se dijele u dvije kategorije: one koji su to razumjeli i one druge.

Druženje sa smrtnicima bistrome je umu pokora, krvarenje kojemu nema kraja. Ako vam i nakon što ste živjeli otvorenih očiju među svojim bližnjima ostane krvi i za druge rane, znači da ništa niste shvatili o porazu sviju nas.

Život ima nešto od histerije svršetka proljeća.

Nisam toliko nesretan da budem pjesnik… ni toliko ravnodušan da budem filozof, samo sam svjestan, ali dovoljno da budem osuđen.

“Živim od onoga od čega drugi umiru” (Michelangelo). Nema se što dodati samoći…

Mislim da nisam propustio nijednu priliku da budem tužan. ( To mi je , kao čovjeku, zvanje.)

Kršćanski su asketi smatrali da su samo pustinje bez grijeha i uspoređivali ih s anđelima. Drugim riječima, čistoća je samo ondje gdje ništa ne uspijeva.

Živimo u sjeni naših poraza i povrijeđenih taština. Našu glad za moći, razdraženu do ludila, nije moguće utažiti na ovome svijetu. Ovdje dolje nema mjesta demijurškome nagonu i njegovu proždrljivom bijesu.

U religiji tražimo utjehu za poraz naše volje za osvajanjem. Ako ovome svijetu dodamo druge svjetove, možemo se nadati divnim pobjedama. Postajemo religiozni iz straha da ćemo se ugušiti u prokletim granicama ovoga svijeta. Zato neukrotiva duša priznaje samo jednog neprijatelja: Boga. On je taj koga treba ubiti, posljednji bastion koji treba osvojiti.

Zadnja riječ svake religije: život kao gubitak duše.

Počinjemo vjerovati iz oholosti – što je, kad već nije smiješno, u svakom slučaju “časno”. Ako se nismo potpuno predali Njemu, moram se baviti ljudima. Može li se pasti niže?

Ne možemo se odlučiti između slobode i sreće. Na jednoj su strani bol i beskraj, na drugoj osrednjost i sigurnost. Čovjek je suviše ponosna zvijer da bi prihvatila sreću i suviše grešna da bi ju prezrela.

Hoću li ikada oprostiti zemlji što me samo kao uljeza uvrstila među svoje?

Japanese Death Poems – Jisei – 辞世

Japanese Death Poems, written by Zen monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death

compiled with an Introduction and commentary by Yoel Hoffmann

images by Shinichi Maruyama

Stefan Zweig, Refuge of Music (chapter on Nietzsche)

Music was there for Nietzsche right from the outset, but it stayed latent, consciously kept at bay by the more powerful will for a spiritual justification. As a child, he impressed his friends with his audacious improvisations and in his juvenile notebooks are found numerous allusions to his own musical compositions. But the more the student is drawn towards philology and then philosophy; the more he stifles this power in his nature, but which still breathes beneath the surface. Music remains for the young man an agreeable respite, a diversion, a pleasure, like the theatre, lectures, riding or fencing, a kind of spiritual gymnastics for the leisure hours. Due to this stringent channelling of interests, this conscious containment, during the early years, not a single note ever filters through to enrich his work: when he writes ‘The Birth of tragedy in the spirit of music’, music remains to him a mere object, a spiritual theme, but no sense of musical inflection penetrates his language, his poetry or thought. Even the youthful lyrical essays are devoid of all musicality and what is perhaps more surprising still, his attempts at composition, according to Bülow – surely a competent judge – displayed a simple subject matter, an amorphous spirit, typically anti-musical. For a long time music was to him only a private proclivity the young intellectual indulged with irresponsible passion, with the pure blitheness of the dilettante, but always beyond and apart from any ‘mission’.
The eruption of music in Nietzsche’s inner life only occurs when the crust of philology, the objective erudition which surrounds his life is shed, when the cosmos is shattered and rent by volcanic shockwaves, when the dyke bursts and the tide suddenly surges in. Music always transports with great force those men who are prey to some upheaval, depleted, subjected to violent tensions and torn to their very entrails by some passion; Tolstoy experienced it, as more tragically did Goethe. For even Goethe, who had established a prudent, reserved and rather troubled relationship to music (just as he did to everything that might spell the demonic, for in each transformation he recognized the seducer), succumbed to music in moments of relaxation, (or as he put it: ‘in moments of opening out’) moments when his whole being is agitated, at times of debilitation and receptiveness. Each time (the last was with Ulrike), he is prey to the feeling he is no longer master of himself, music powerfully engulfs the dam, draws tears from his eyes as tribute, and for music, poetic, joyful, an inadvertent gratitude. Music – and who has not experienced this? – always demands we are in a receptive state, exposed, with a kind of blissful feminine longing to properly garner the fruit of our feelings: that is how it reached Nietzsche at the moment when the south opened up before him, in that carnivorous longing for more life. With curious symbolism it infected him at precisely the moment when his life left the serene, learned phase and passed through sudden catharsis to tragedy; he thought to express The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music and he experienced the very opposite: the Birth of Music in the Spirit of Tragedy. The overwhelming potency of new feelings did not suit measured discourse; it aspired to a stronger element, a superior magic: ‘You must sing out, oh you my soul.’
Because that demonic wellspring of his being had for so long been blocked by philology, erudition and taedium vitae, it now pours forth with so much power and exerts immense liquid pressure, on the innermost fibres of his nervous system, on the final intonation of his style. As if following the infusion of a new vitality, which until then had only embodied things, he suddenly begins to breathe musically: an andante maestoso of speech, the ponderous style of his old writings takes on a more sinuous supple ‘undulatory’ character, the multiple movements of music. All the minor refinements of a virtuoso shine out: the tiny sharp staccato of his aphorisms, the sordino of the songs, the pizzicati of the mockery, the risqué stylizations and harmonies of the prose, the maxims of the poetry. Even the punctuation, the dashes, the pauses and underlining, have all the bearing of musical symbols; never has there been in the German language such a feeling of instrumental prose, or a prose now with a chamber orchestra behind it, now with a full ensemble. An artist of language can find as much pleasure in Nietzsche’s polyphony as a musician studying the score of a composer: how many encapsulated and secreted harmonies lie concealed behind the most exaggerated dissonances. How many lucid spiritual forms bask in the rapturous overabundance! For not only are the nervous extremities of the language vibrant with musicality, but the works themselves recall a symphony; their architecture is not coldly intellectual and objective, but issues from a purely musical inspiration. He said himself of Zarathustra, that it was written ‘In the spirit of the opening movement of the Ninth Symphony’; and then the prelude of Ecce Homo, unique and truly godlike in terms of language. Are these monumental phrases nothing less than an organ prelude to some colossal cathedral of the future? Poetry like ‘Night Song’, ‘Gondolier Song’; are they not the elemental songs of the human voice amidst its infinite solitude? And in its drunken fervour was it ever so full of dance, so heroic, so Greek as in the paean of his last rejoicing, in the dithyramb of Dionysus? Irradiated on the surface by the limpid light of the south, stirred to his furthest depths by swirls of music, his language becomes liquid and mobile like a wave and in the majestic marine element; Nietzsche’s mind performs circles, carrying him into the vortex of his downfall.
Now, as music penetrates him so deeply, Nietzsche, with his alertness to the demon, immediately registers the danger; he senses that this wave could drag him beyond himself. But while Goethe avoided such peril – ‘Goethe’s prudent attitude towards music’, as Nietzsche once noted, he by contrast seizes it by the horns; transformations of values and about turns are his means of defence. And so, (as for his sickness) he makes of it a medicine. Music must be for him now something other than during the years as a philologist. Then he demanded of it an ever-greater tension, a flood of emotion. (Wagner!); its luxuriance and headiness acted as a counterweight to his toneless scholarly existence and proved a stimulant to professorial sterility. But now his thought itself is all excess and ecstasy, he needs music as a kind of psychic bromide, an interior sedative. He has no need to intoxicate himself (for now all that is spiritual is intoxicating), but music is required as ‘holy sobriety’, as Hölderlin so artfully put it. Music as relaxation, not as excitement. He seeks a music in which to take refuge, when he returns mortally wounded and overwhelmed by fatigue after the chase; he wants to find sanctuary there, a bath, a crystalline wave that cools and purifies: musica divina, a music from on high, issuing from the clear sky and not from a soul on heat, suffocating and compressed. A music which will help him forget everything, not a music to draw himself back into crises and catastrophes of feeling, but a music that ‘says yes and yes again’, a music of the south, clear as the water of its harmonies, natural and pure, a music ‘one can whistle’. A music not of chaos (that glows only in itself), but of the seventh day of creation, where all is at rest and where only the spheres praise their God, music as a place of rest. ‘Now I have reached a safe harbour, music, music!’ 
Lightness; that is Nietzsche’s last love, his highest measure of all things. What makes him light and gives him health is good: food, spirit, air, sun, landscape, music. What enables him to rise, to forgo the darkness and heaviness of life, the ugliness of truth, that alone is a source of grace. From there comes the belated love of art, as something ‘making life possible’, as ‘the great stimulant of life’. Music, clear, liberating, light, becomes from now on the most cherished refreshment for this fatally anguished mind. During the convulsions of his bloody births, he cannot do without it as a palliative. ‘Life without music is simply infirmity and delusion.’ Even a man sick with fever, who stretches his cracked and burning lips towards water, cannot know a movement so violent as when he calls for his silvery elixir. ‘Did any man ever thirst for music more than I?’ It is his last hurrah, his last bid to save him from himself: from it comes the apocalyptic hatred for Wagner, who disturbed the crystalline purity of music with narcotics and stimulants; hence Nietzsche’s sufferings realizing ‘music’s destiny, like an open wound’. The solitary has forsaken all gods; only this one thing does he wish to preserve, his nectar and ambrosia, which refreshes the soul and eternally rejuvenates. ‘Art and nothing but art – we have art so that we might not die of truth.’ With the desperate claw of the drowning man, he clings to its potency, a power that does not depend on weight, so it might bear him and transport him to its enchanted element.
And music, so harrowingly summoned, inclines towards him and cradles Nietzsche’s falling body. All have abandoned the febrile one; friends have long since departed; his thoughts are always of the road, the far distance, on further reckless wanderings; only music is there to accompany him in his final, seventh solitude. What he touches, she touches with him; when he speaks, her clear voice also sounds; forcefully she lifts up he who has weakened prematurely. And when he finally topples into the abyss, she watches over his extinguished soul; Overbeck, who enters the room of the blinded spirit, finds him at the piano, searching out higher melodies with trembling hands and as they carry him home the distracted one sings throughout the entire journey, affecting melodies, his ‘Gondolier song’. Into the darkness of the mind music accompanies him, life and death pervaded by her demonic presence.

Stefan Zweig, Nietzsche, VIII – Refuge of Music

Landscape of Sils-Maria

Stefan Zweig, Bijeg u muziku (poglavlje o Nietzscheu)

Bijeg u muziku

                   Veselosti zlaćana, dođi!       
                      Dioniziovi ditirambi

                    Horizont Sils-Marie

 Muzika je sveudilj bila u Nietzscheu, samo vazda latentna, nju je vazda svjesno potiskivala snažnija volja za duhovnim opravdanjem. Već je kao dječak smionim improvizacijama oduševljavao svoje prijatelje, au njegovim mladenačkim dnevnicima česta su upućivanja na vlastitu kompoziciju. No što se kao student odlučnije izjašnjava za filologiju i potom za filozofiju, to više obuzdava moć svoje prirode što teži elementarnom izviranju iz podzemlja. Za mladog fillologa ostaje muzika dobrodošli otium, odmaranje od ozbiljnosti, strast kao kazalište, čitanje, jahanje ili mačevanje, duhovna gimnastička dokolica. Zbog toga pomnog kanaliziranja, toga svjesnog zagrađivanja gatom, tijekom prvih godina ne prokapljuje plodonosno ni jedna kap u njegovo djelo. Dok piše Rođenje tragedijde iz duha muzike, muzika ostaje samo predmet, objekt, samo duhovna tema – ali u njegov jezik, u njegovo pjesništvo, u njegov način mišljenja ne prodire ni jedan titraj muzikalnog osjećanja u njihovu moduliranju. Čak i u Nietzscheovoj mladenačkoj lirici nedostaje svaka muzikalnost, dapače, što nas još više čudi – njegovi pokušaji komponiranja kao da su, prema kompetentnom sudu Von Bulowa, amorfna duha – tipična antimuzika. Muzika jest i ostaje za nj dugo vremena samo osobno nagnuće kojim se mladi učenjak bavi s punom nasladom neodgovornosti, s čistom radošću diletantizma, no svagda s onu stranu i postrance od svoje “zadaće”.

  Prodiranje muzike u Nietzscheov unutarnji svijet pristiglo je tek kad je olabavila ona filološka kora, učena stvarnost oko njegova života, kad su vulkanski udarci potresli i razderali cio kozmos. Tek tada pucaju kanali i odjednom izlaze iz korita. Muzika uvijek najsnažnije nadire u silno uzbuđenog, oslabljenog, nasilno napetog čovjeka kojega je nekakva strast razderala do dna duše – to je Tolstoj pravilno uočio, a Goethe tragično osjetio. Jer čak i on koji je prema muzici zauzeo oprezan, obrambeno bojažljiv stav (kao prema svemu demonskom: one je u svakom preobražaju prepoznavao zavodnika), čak i on podliježe muzici samo u trenucima slabosti (ili kako on kaže: “u razastrtim trenucima”) kad je izrovano cijelo njegovo biće, u satima njegove slabosti, otvorenosti. Svagda kad postaje( zadnj put kod Ulrike) plijenom jednog osjećaja i nije više sam svoj gospodar, onda muzika preplavljuje i najčvršći nasip, izmamljuje mu suzu kao danak i muziku, ispjevanu, najdivniju muziku kao neželjenu zahvalnost. Muzika – a tko to nije doživio? – svagda treba otvorenu dušu, otvorenost, ženstvenost u smislu blažene čežnje da bi plodonosno prodrla u neki osjećaj; tako pogađa i Nietzschea u času kad ga je jug razmekšao i otvorio ga, u jednom stanju najpožudnije, najčeznutiljivije želje za životom. Ona se jednom neobičnom simbolikom pojavljuje upravo u onoj sekundi kad se njegov život u iznenadnoj katarzi odvraća od onoga što je napustio, od nastavka epskog stvaranja u tragičnosti. On je želio prikazati Rođenje tragedije iz duha muzike, a doživio je upravo obrnuto: rođenje muzike iz duha tragedije. Premoćna snaga novih osjećaja ne nalazi više svoj izražaj u odmjerenom govoru, nego nadire prema snažnijem elementu, prema višoj magiji: “Morat ćeš pjevati, o dušo moja”.

  Upravo zato jer je ono najdublje, demonsko izvorište njegova bića bilo tako dugo zasuto filologijom, učenošću i ravnodušjem, ono izbija takvom silinom i tjera svoj tekući mlaz pod takvim tlakom sve do zadnjih niti živaca, do zadnje intonacije njegova stila. Kao nakon infiltracije nove vitalnosti, jezik koji ju je dotad htio samo prikazati odjenom počinje disati muzikalno: andante maestoso predavanja, težak govorni stil njegovih dotadašnjih spisa dobio je sada nekakvu “undulaciju”, valovitost, mnogostruku muzičku pokretljivost. U njoj sada svjetlucaju sve one male istančanosti jednoga virtuoza, ona sitna peckava staccata aforizama, lirski sordino u pjesmama, pizzicata poruge, smiona slijevanja i harmonizacije proze, izreka i pjesme. Čak i interpunkcija, ono u jeziku neizgovoreno, crtice i naglašavanja apsolutno djeluju poput muzičkih znakova: nikada dotad nismo u njemačkom jeziku tako snažno osjećali orkestriranu prozu. Duboko osjetiti njezinu istančanu dotad nikada dostignutu polifoniju za jezičnog artista znači jednaku nasladu kao što za muzičara znači proučavanje majstorske partiture: koliko se pritajene i začahurene harmonije krije iza pretjerano oštrih disonanci, koliko jasnog duha oblika u tom tako opojnom obilju! Jer ne vibriraju od muzikalnosti samo završeci jezika: i sama se djela osjećaju simfonijski, ne potječu više iz duhovno smišljene, hladne misaone arhitekture, nego neposredno iz muzičkog nadahnuća. Za Zaratustru je sam Nietzsche jednom rekao da je napisan “u duhu prvog stavka Devete simfonije”, a tek ona jezično jedinstvena, istinski božanska predigra djelu Ecce homo – nisu li te veličanstvene rečenice zamišljene kao preludij za orgulje u nekoj golemoj katedrali budućnosti? Nisu li pjesme kao što su “Pjeesma noći” ili “Pjesma gondola” iskonsko pjevanje ljudskoga glasa iz beskrajne samotinje? A kad je onda opojnost postala tako rasplesana, tako herojska, tako posve grčka muzika kao u peanu njegova zadnjeg kliktanja, u Dionizovu ditirambu? Odozgo prozračen svom vedrinom juga, a odozdo uskovitlan strujanjem muzike, jezik ovdje doista nikada ne postaje mirnim valom, i u tom kao more veličanstvenom elementu kruži sad Nietzscheov duh sve do vrtloga propasti.

 Budući da sada muzika tako burno i nasilno prodire u njega, Nietzsche, taj demonski znalac, odmah razabire i njezinu pogibelj: osjeća da bi ga ta struja mogla odnijeti daleko izvan njega samoga. No dok Goethe izbjegava pogibelji koje mu prijete – “Goetheovo oprezno držanje prema muzici”, bilježi Nietzsche jednom – Nietzsche se vazda s njom hvata u koštac prevrednovanja, preobrazbe, to je njegov način obrane. I tako on (kao u vrijeme svoje bolesti) od otrova pravi lijek. Muzika sada za njega mora biti nešto drugo nego u njegovim filološkim godinama: u ono vrijeme tražio je on pojačanu napetost živaca, bujanje osjećaja (Wagner!), protutežu za svoju smirenu, učenu egzistenciju. No sada kada mu je mišljenje već samo po sebi eksces i ekstatično rasipanje osjećaja, treba on muziku kao nekovrstan duševni brom, kao ponovno unutarnje smirivanje. Ona mu više ne treba pružiti opojnost (jer sve duhovno postaje za nj zvonkom opojnošću), nego mu, prema divnim Hölderlinovim riječima, treba dati “svetu trijeznost”: “muzika kao oporavak, a ne kao sredstvo uzbuđivanja”. On želi muziku u koju može pobjeći kad nasmrt ranjen i umoran od hajke svojih misli zatetura, on treba pribježište, kupelj, kristalne valove koji hlade i pročšćuju - musicu divinu, muziku odozgo, muziku iz vedra neba a ne iz stlačene, sparne, požudne duše. On treba muziku koja će mu pomoći da zaboravi samog sebe, a ne muziku koja ga opet tjera natrag u njega samoga, muziku koja “kaže Da, koja čini Da”, južnjačku muziku bistru kao voda u njezinim harmonijama, iskonski jednostavnu i čistu, “muziku koja se može zviždati”. On ne treba muziku kaosa (jer se kaos žari u njemu samome), nego muziku sedmoga dana stvaranja svijeta, kad sve počiva i samo sfere radosno slave svojega Boga, muziku kao odmor: “No sad kad sam u luci: muziku, muziku!”

 Posljednja Nietzscheova ljubav je lakoća, njegova najviša mjera za sve stvari. Dobro je ono što se čini lakim, što liječi: u hrani, u duhu, u zraku, u suncu, u krajoliku, u muzici. Milost poklanja jedino ono što omogućuje lelujanje, što pomaže da se zaboravi tupost i mračnost života, kao i ružnoća istine. Zato i ta posljednja, ta kasna ljubav prema umjetnosti kao nečemu što “omogućuje život”, kao velikom stimulansu života. Muzika, vedra, oslobodilačka, laka muzika postaje odsada najomiljenija okrepa toga nasmrt uzbuđena čovjeka. “Život bez muzike jednostano je napor, zabluda.” Čovjek kojeg trese groznica ne može silovitije tražiti vodu svojim ispucanim usnicama, zažarenim od vrućine, nego što Nietzsche u svojim zadnjim krizama žudi za njezinim srebrnim napitkom. “Je li ikad neki čovjek osjetio toliku žeđ za muzikom?” Muzika je njegov zadnji spas, njego spas pred samim sobom: zbog toga i ta apokaliptička mržnja prema Wagneru koji je narkoticima i stimulansima zamutio njezinu kristalnu čistoću, zato i ta patnja “zbog usuda muzike kao od neke otvorene rane”. Taj samotnik odbacio je sve bogove, ali ne dopušta da mu otmu samo to jedno, njegov nektar i njegovu ambroziju koji osvježuju i vječno pomlađuju dušu. “Umjetnost i ništa osim umjetnosti – imamo umjetnost da ne bismo propali zbog istine.” Žestokim zahvatom utopljenika hvata se on za nju, za jedinu silu života koja ne podliježe zakonu teže, da bi ga ona uhvatila i uzdigla u svoj blaženi element.

 A muzika koju je tako potreseno zaklinjao dobrostivo se sagiba i grli njegovo tijelo koje se ruši. Svi su napustili toga grozničavog čovjeka. Prijatelji su već odavna otišli, a misli su mu vazda negdje na putu, uvijek na nekim smionim lutanjima. Samo ga muzika prati u njegovu posljednju, sedmu samotnost. Što dodiruje on, i ona dodiruje s njime, gdje god govori on, istodobno odjekuje i njezin jasni glas. Ona vazda iznova silom uzdiže toga čovjeka kojega nešto svom silom vuče dolje. A kad se konačno srušio, ona još bdi ponad njegove ugasle duše; Franz Overbeck koji ulazi u sobu toga duhovno zaslijepljena čovjeka, zatiče ga za klavirom gdje drhtavim rukama još traži uzvišene harmonije, a kad tog čovjeka pomračena uma otpremaju kući, on cijelim putem pjeva u potresnim melodijama svoju “Pjesmu gondoli”. Sve do pomračenosti duha prati ga muzika ispunjavajući mu smrt i život svojom demonskom prisutnošću.

Stefan Zweig – Nietzsche, VIII – Bijeg u muziku

preveo Mario Kopić

Marin Sorescu, How to be a fakir

No one says you have to write, no one says you have to read. My own writing is simply an energy discharge, a short cut from mind to heart. I electrify myself continuously, in a state of fakir-like bliss. The nails penetrate my flesh, they hurt me. I’m just an apprentice-fakir, so the double edge of joy and pain becomes visible in me. But it’s joy I hope to transmit.

I’ve written poetry for a long time, and I still don’t know where it comes from. For me it’s the highest thing there is, an almost scientific approach to knowledge, an apparatus of unpredictable laws. Intuition is behind it. It’s more potent than any mathematical calculation. It sets the most profound and powerful human forces loose. Don’t underestimate it.

A Romanian poet from the last century called one of his poetry collections When I Have Nothing Else To Do. I’ve nothing else to do myself most of the time, so I’ve dedicated myself to the task of cracking the mystery – The Mystery Cracker. Everybody knows the modern mystery is locked away in a safe, of course, at the extremity of the world, inside an iceberg. Forever.

So my irony must be sweet-tempered. Almost a smile. Firstly, no one should worry about liberating the mystery; it won’t vanish into thin air. Secondly, poetry should have a crystalline shape – no wrapping paper, no baroque ornament. And though poetry sometimes appears to lose its form, it never abandons ritual – myth is its natural environment, no matter what kind. It could be ancient myth, it could be what we’re witnessing today: the slow taking shape of modern myth.

A unique gesture by the poet becomes whole and finds its echo in the unique gesture of a reader. Tongue-tied Homer wouldn’t have brought a single hexameter to fruition without an audience of geniuses around him, listening, mouths wide open. We need to find those prodigies of the fertile, illiterate times again, the ones who could read with their ears.

How are we going to enjoy The Iliad or The Odyssey today without some of that old time emulation and complicity between reader and poet? And shouldn’t the intimacy of writing pleasurably entwine with the intimacy of reading, whether the process involves reading aloud or not?

The gods will have to give us a hand here. A new period for the human race is gradually becoming distinct (the modern age) and we’ve no time to waste. Let’s record it swiftly, using black magic spells – in up to date versions – and some of those forgotten songs you still can’t forget. Material from the past will take on new shapes, verified by suggestion, sculpted by memory. And the poet, bowed under the weight of a tradition he commands, will continue to rearrange the world. Endlessly.

Marin Sorescu, Censored Poems

The arrow

Wounded, he’d have
been lost in the forst,
had he not followed the arrow.

More than half
of it
protruded from his chest
and showed him the way.

The arrow
had struck him in the back
and pierced his body.
Its bloodied tip
was a signpost.

What a blessing
to have it point
a path
between the trees!

Now he knew
he’d never again
go wrong

and he
wasn’t far
from the mark.

Labyrinth

I misunderstood a yoga technique
and reached zen.
I misunderstood a zen technique
and reached tao.
I misunderstood a tao technique
and suddenly became a Jew.

I tried them all, the main faiths, one by one,
and all the sects,
perplexed,
as if thrown from wall to wall
by the monstrous tremors
of knowledge.

And now
what shall I do in this labyrinth,
stranded on the rock of my heart?

How shall I find my way home to that unhappy
brute,
astounding life?

Shakespeare
(Forest Books, Trans. A. Deletant & B. Walker)

Shakespeare created the world in seven days.

On the first day he made the sky, the mountains and the depths of the soul.
On the second day he made rivers, seas, oceans
And other emotions —
And he gave them to Hamlet, Julius Ceasar, Anthony, Cleopatra and Ophelia,
To Othello and others,
To be master over them, with their descendants,
For ever and ever.
On the third day he gathered all the people
And taught them to savour:
The taste of happiness, love, despair,
The taste of jealousy, fame and so on,
Until all tasting was finished.

Then some late-comers arrived.
The creator patted their heads with compoassion,
Saying the only roles left for them were
The literary critics
Who could then demolish his work.
The fourth and fifth day he reserved for laughter.
He allowed clowns
To tumble,
He allowed kings, emperors
And other unfortunates to amuse themselves.
On the sixth day he completed the administration:
He set up a tempest
He taught King Lear
How to wear a straw crown.
As there were a few leftovers from the creation of the world
He designed Richard III.
On the seventh day he took stock to see what else might be done.
And Shakespeare thought that after so much effort
He deserved to see a performance;
But first, as he was overtired,
He went to die a little.

Accountancy
(Trans. C. Iliescu)

It comes a day
When we must draw under oureselves
A black line.
And sum up.

Few moments when we were about to be happy,
Few moments when we were about to be beautiful,
Few moments when we were about to be brilliant.
Several times we met
Some mountains, trees and rivers
(Where might they be? And, are they still alive?)
All this sums up a shiny future
That we’ve already lived.

One woman we loved
Plus the same woman who didn’t love us,
Make zero.

A quarter of your life of studies
Sums up some thousand million of fodder words,
Whose wisdom we have gradually dropped.

And finally one Fate
Plus another Fate (where does this come from?)
Make two. ( We write one and we keep one
Maybe, who knows, there might be life beyond).

Chess
(Forest Books, Trans. A. Deletant & B. Walker)

I move a white day.
He moves a black one.
I advance with a dream.
He takes it to war.
He attacks my lungs.
I think for about a year in hospital.
I make a brilliant combination
And win a black day.
He moves with a disaster.
And threatens me with cancer
(which moves for the moment in the shape of a cross)
But, I put a book before him
He’s obliged to retreat.
I win a few more pieces,
But, look, half my life
Is taken.
– If I give you check, you lose your optimism,
He tells me,
– It doesn’t matter, I joke,
I’ll do the castling of feelings.

Behind me my wife, children.
The sun, the moon and other onlookers
Tremble for every move I make.

I light a cigarette
And continue the game.

The disease

Doc, I feel something deadly
Here, where my being is,
Every organ in my body hurts.
During the day the sun hurts me
And the moon and stars at the night.
I feel something very painful in the cloud on the sky
And I wake up every morning
Feeling like winter.

I took all kinds of pills for nothing
I hated and I loved, I learned to read
And I even read some books,
I spoke to people and I thought,
I was good and beautiful…

All these didn’t have any effect, doc
And I spend a lot of money on all these.

I think I must have caught the disease of death
Some time ago,
When I was born.

I saw the light

I saw the light on Earth
And I got born
To see how you are doing

Healthy? Strong?
How is happiness treating you?

Thank you, don’t answer
I don’t have time for answers,
I hardly have time for asking questions.
But I like it here
Warm, nice,
And so much light that
Grass is growing.
And that girl, look,
Is watching me with her soul…
Not, dear, don’t trouble yourself loving me.
But a black coffee I will accept
From your hand.
I like that you know how to make it
Bitter.

Double

By night,
Somebody wears my clothes.
In the morning I can notice fresh mud on the shoes
I wonder, who else has the one same walk as me?

It started not long ago,
To also wear my thoughts
When I wake up I can never find them
Where I left them.

They are worn out, tired, with dark rings around the
eyes,
It is obvious that somebody
Thought with them
All night.
I wonder, who else has the one same soul as me?

Ladder to Heaven*

(*his last poem, written in hospital, few days before his death. Trans by Constantin Roman)

A silken thread, spun by a spider
Hangs from the ceiling
Just above my bed.

Day by day I watch it descend.
And think, ‘now heaven offers me ladder,
It reaches to me from above’.

Weakened though I be,
A shadow of my former self,
I think the ladder might not
Support my weight.

Listen, my soul, on you go ahead,
Softly, softly.

Martin Burckhardt and Dirk Höfer, A Digital Apocalypse

Alex Gross, Android

4. Digital Plagues – The Great Flood

The simultaneous presence of all that has ever been created, medieval theology taught, is Hell. Under these auspices, the Internet may be understood as a site of world constipation: a digital inferno. The Net never forgets. And even when the party in charge of one server or another takes care to keep his digital lawn free of unseemly waste, the prevailing logic of proliferation ensures that each and every item of data is destined to last forever. If, in the innocent childhood of the Internet, the scientific community was still inclined to view the swell of stored information as proof that universal knowledge was growing, it is now clear that apathy, malice, and superstition are spreading as much—if not more—than before. In Hell, of course, all such depravity is part of universal knowledge, too. Toward the end of his life, Flaubert toyed with the idea of writing an encyclopedia of stupidity. If he rose from the grave today, Flaubert would have to admit that this work has long since been done—worse still, that it’s constantly being rewritten and expanded. Information means advertising, philosophy, photos, threads, posts, and shops. It includes decapitation videos, funny cats, vanilla sex, hate-filled comments, high-end liquor sales, and front-page news. The whole landscape of Dante’s Inferno opens wide—except that the Net has done away with the circles that once provided orientation for the medieval pilgrim. Moreover, systematic falsification and disinformation—which, in this deluge, are no longer identifiable as such—cause tsunami-like waves of agitation. Marketing firms and governmental agencies make virtuosic displays of how such quakes in social networks can serve the interests of propaganda.
The most powerful effect of information overkill, perhaps, is that users feel they can lay hold of this flotsam at any time and, consequently, no longer bother committing anything to memory. Indeed, they fall deaf to temporal depth—to historical consciousness. How did Alexander Kluge put it? “The attack of the present on the rest of time.”

5. The New Jerusalem – The Sky Is Blue

When a tourist travels somewhere and takes a picture that is already in a guidebook, she or he is not just looking for an encounter with the world; instead, this person is collaborating, along with millions of other tourists, in a world simulation. The image will be posted, and at some point—out of legions of photos taken all over the globe—a pattern will emerge that might equal the world yet still have nothing to do with it. Nor are tourists the only ones participating in the project of world simulation. Anyone who takes pictures and uploads them is helping to launch the photographic capsule—and, with it, all that we normally consider to constitute the world—into digital space: a kind of ascension to heaven. Images that come in droves on the Net (Instagram alone charts some 40 million uploads every day) form an artificial “outer space”; atomized into isolated images, the world grows liquid and, in the process, creates an environment in which we feel as secure as an embryo in amniotic fluid. Just as the waters of the womb simulate a milieu corresponding to the ocean some 400 million years ago—the lifeworld, such as it was—the gazillions of photos posted today are making a sphere of images allowing us to think that we still are safe.
This liquidation of the world image can be understood as a social sculpture (though perhaps a watered-down version). Out of the images—this great vortex of digital “world substance”—it is not just the surface that precipitates and takes shape; rather, each one of the world’s components becomes charged with energy that, for the sake of simplicity, we may call psychosocial. Like a liquid, it displays the colorations and covalencies of all that holds molecular fabric together and keeps things flexible. Whatever gets divided is shared and passed along for some purpose—however slight it may be. In the broadest sense, what circulates involves recognition: a strengthened social bond, self-confidence, a feeling of vitality, a sense of belonging to groups that have been chosen or count as predestined, and so on. The chosen images—their motifs, significance (i.e., upload potential), and communicative and aesthetic valencies—attest to the intentions, desires, expectations, fears, and anxieties of billions of people participating in the world-simulation project, whether they mean to do so or not. And all this energy finds its way into the great, amniotic whirl of the world that the Internet—a place for storage, work, and living life—represents. They are the stuff from which the new Jerusalem is being built.
That said, what washes ashore is artificial. Like the plastic detritus gathered in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, rejected elements are producing a gigantic trash vortex of “world stuff.”

5. The New Jerusalem – Seventh Heaven

Just as messages sent over the Internet are allocated to data packages that then stream down to the target point as a BitTorrent, programs do not represent physical so much as functional unities. There’s no need for them to rest on a hard disk as a memory block; in fact, they don’t even need to be stored on the same server. A computer can download various modules from different servers and combine them into a program during runtime. (This process is now the standard with Internet sites.) If we step through the looking-glass, what stood before us as an illusory unity on the interface proves to be an object split through and through: a series of zeros and ones that have been divided into blocks, clusters, packets, domains, and ranges of validity. The inconsistency of such an arrangement does not pose a disadvantage; it represents the very condition for achieving the adaptability that is so prized today. The object is assembled “on the fly,” as it were. As such, it is less an object than a cloud of particles, or a state of suspension.
This formation—in which it is easy to recognize our xⁿ—has a structure similar to the picture we have of the synaptic networks in our brains: a switchboard of various spatial points that come together as an ephemeris, an impermanent and transitory state. What is called swarm intelligence, then, does not represent a surface phenomenon, nor does it refer to an essentially social mode of being. It inheres in the program architecture of objects. In the nineteenth century, Babbage already identified the specific nature of this way of thinking: when we utter a word, it doesn’t even take twenty-four hours for the particles we emit to circle the globe. Were it possible to design an apparatus for reading these bits, our atmosphere would yield a library of all that has ever been said. Indeed, one might even reproduce the words that Jesus spoke on the cross. If speech acts—and objects, too—are up in the air, the necessary consequence is for us to adopt a systemic, atmospheric point of view. It is not the particular object that matters, but how it is grouped with others—into a mesh, a tissue, a cloud.

5. The New Jerusalem – The Living Archive

From clay tablets to paper, microfilm, and digital copy: the forms assumed by institutional memory have become more and more immaterial over time. In a broader sense, institutional memory includes magazines, libraries, museums, arsenals, archives, and registries. In the age of representation—which is now drawing to a close—institutional memory has been viewed as a building, a storage area. Its epitome is the museum. Museums present collections that stand as the sediments of cultural achievement. By this means, society can retroactively call back, into the present, what it has done and what it has been: it can canonize its accomplishments. But in the digital realm, the nature of the archive changes. Systems of preservation and presentation that are organized according to a symbolic order—for instance, ordered alphabetically or chronologically—lose spatial and temporal points of reference. Even though we still speak of “addresses,” the term now marks an ascription that no longer has a spatial equivalent, or else makes it ad hoc and subject to change. A digital archive is not a location one visits, where one finds exhibits at the ready; instead, it consists of scattered “displays” for retrieving material as a simulacrum.
In the digital archive, any given object loses its uniqueness, turning into a document that is available anywhere (xⁿ). As such, it exists free of context and can pop up in highly variable arrangements. The work of art—indeed, the image in general—loses its exemplary status; it occupies a “place” that depends on typologies, color schemes, and tagging systems. It ceases to attest to deeds and becomes a gestural element, a hieroglyph—part of a character set open for use. Just as the Mona Lisa has become a cultural icon that shows up in endless reworkings, communication about things is replacing the things themselves. In keeping with Wittgenstein’s dictum (“the meaning of a word is its use”), meaning no longer lies in the artifact; instead, its significance derives from a discursive imbroglio: talk that the object, which itself is mute, evokes. Inasmuch as such discourse (interpretation, commentary, critique, and so on) is stored and can be connected to the original, a nexus—a kind of social agitation or arousal—emerges. Even if the item in question points to an individual author, the intensity of the responses it generates reveals that, in fact, it functions as an amplifier for collective desire. In this sense, the Internet—indeed, every database—embodies a kind of living archive: here, the present is packed away into a museum, but it can always be sampled, reanimated, and put on display again.

6. Genesis 2.0 - Social Spawn

As a rule, digitizing natural objects still means making digital reproductions. However, big data has introduced a form of modeling that works exclusively with relations: the fact that in some arbitrary respect, as per specification, a similarity can be found between objects. If, for instance, one looks up all the words in a dictionary that are thirteen or nineteen letters long, the law uniting them has nothing to do with the words’ meaning. The words constitute a group on the basis of a formal system for ordering a “population,” a social structure. By the same token, all items displaying the same timestamp might be brought together under a single heading. “Structure,” Roland Barthes wrote, “is therefore actually a simulacrum of the object, but a directed, interested simulacrum, since the imitated object makes something appear which remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible in the natural object.” For Barthes, structural logic was in the eye of the beholder. Now, we face structures emerging from the space between objects in a databank. The formula x = xⁿ—especially when it works out as x = x² = x³ = x⁴, etc.—opens up a dimension for new structures, new constructs, to take shape.
All this might seem rather abstract, yet the business models followed by social networks have long since spelled it out as a command. Even though we still speak of “friends,” everybody knows that this group functions as a voting herd: a multiplier indicating a particular user’s significance in terms of traffic. The result is striking: laws of friendship, which used to be informal, become elastic as soon as they are given notation and inscribed. Consequently, communities of fans now can simply be bought. Inasmuch as the new laws of friendship emerge as manipulable quantities, they expose the blind spot central to a certain ideology and image of humanity. Suddenly (as NSA metadata analyses have made clear), relations become visible that would have better remained hidden: who with whom, where and when. Friendship is the name for everything that one can count on yet defies calculation. When this paradox becomes formalized, the Other of capitalism vanishes.

6. Genesis 2.0 – In the Data Envelope

Angels, medieval thinking held, move so rapidly that if one of them needed to travel from Rome to Barcelona in bad weather, two raindrops would barely touch its wings. The Internet—especially in conjunction with mobile radio technology—has given us just such an angelic body. Even when, heavy-limbed, we trudge across the street, we are moving in an ether of information. We may still deem ourselves integral beings, but in fact we have long possessed two bodies that are independent of each other—and not just in terms of speed, but by nature. I can do as I wish with my natural body, but my “data body” travels on far darker terrain. Suppose, for instance, that the police are looking for me. The signal my data body emits will let the authorities track me down—and, if need be, liquidate me (by means of a drone, for instance).
As such, part of my person has dissolved into a data body. Or, more precisely, it manifests itself as a data body. If someone else—an institution or a program—manages to get hold of this second body, not only can purchases be made in my name; insofar as my social network is accessed, such capture may lead to my social death.
Thus, the problem of data security occupies the abyss between the ether, where my data body resides, and the physical world of objects. This gulf, which also represents a contradiction, enables legal entities—institutions like the NSA or companies like Google—to gain power over my data body: a form of symbolic arrest, or habeas corpus. It is impossible to resolve the dilemma, even if every kind of abuse could be prevented. As soon as I take advantage of the conveniences that come to the company of angels (navigation, search engines, and communication at the speed of light), I hand my data body over and make it public domain. Anyone who so desires can now track down my vita and texts—whatever I feed into the ether—and use the information to his or her own ends. The networking of my data body—like the wiring of eighteenth-century monks—represents the precondition for any number of applications that now seem indispensable insofar as they unite human beings into an angelic host of sublime sociability (under one flag or another).
At the same time, this social network dissolves everything I consider to constitute my identity. No one can claim that a given piece of information belongs to a determinate physical body in the data dimension; it might be assigned an address, but the blank space that the body forms has no purchase here. Ultimately, affirming data sovereignty would entail the collapse of all the comforts the angelic host enjoys. For that matter: would anyone crossing a wet field claim to have “authored” the tracks she or he leaves behind?

7. Expulsion into Paradise – The Outer World of the Inner World

When we sit in front of a screen, our body stays outside. Mentally, we are behind the screen—up on the data cloud, out in data space. Viewed from this perspective, the world of things appears bizarre, slow, and refractory—somehow odd. Mentally, we occupy a fluid, digital realm, but our body inhabits a world where the treachery of the object, a certain physical objectionability, prevails. This state of affairs has consequences. Our inner thoughts, which are already fluid, are shifting more and more to the digital sphere. Photos, posts, messages, blogs, and emails are now what convey our sense of being, not our bodies. As such, inwardness no longer occupies the core of our physical existence; it has been outsourced into the cloud. Indeed, the body itself is increasingly being transferred into the sphere of data by way of its various functions. Blood pressure information, blood sugar levels, urine concentration, fertility calculations, and cybersex are moving physical sensation—once considered the inalienable core of individuality—into the realm of data. What’s left?
When interiority abandons the body as a site of residence and wanders off into data space, it becomes what it always already was: virtual. After all, the world within is where desires are administrated. Proper management is called virtue, virtus. It involves mastering and moderating appetites: not repression so much as tactical and strategic deployment, an economy of restraint and targeted release. But it takes some room to restrain desires and still keep them alive: it takes the inner world. Inasmuch as interiority shifts to data space, where it can be more readily administrated—and especially by third parties (which is why institutions have always sought to gain power over it)—the body is set free. Now, the body no longer stands as the fortress of interiority. It has become the projection surface for the soul. Since the inner world is drifting off into the realm of data, the body is turning into the site where relics of psychic space manifest themselves. Tattoos and piercings—tribal designs, spiderwebs, mythological animals, souvenirs, snakes, dragons, ornamental patterns, and so on—fill up the junk room of the psyche and spill outside, onto the body. In a certain sense, this represents an act of resistance: if the inner world is becoming commensurate with data, at least the body can avoid the same fate. That said, such practices amount to weak, apotropaic magic against the ghosts of interiority now inhabiting the data dimension. In fact, the ghosts of the machine are haunting the body and making it, aesthetically and functionally, into another machine. Cosmetic operations, body shaping, and fitness regimes serve to smooth out unsightly remainders of the past. The body is being pulled to pieces.
Such optimization measures represent administrative actions now that the body has been fired from the position of safeguarding interiority. Once it is no longer governed by inner forces—once it has been liberated from the soul—the body can be reformatted as a product: smooth surfaces, ideal proportions, compatible features, and customized design. Indeed, it turns into a surface where the digital machine writes its code. The body becomes writing, a digital medium; it no longer expresses individuality so much as the potentiality of x’s alterity evacuated to the power of n. Alter ego: the real me.

8. The World of Angels – Psychopomp

Does digital space mark the outer limit, the precipice, where ships flying the flag of our worldview start falling into the abyss? Yes and no. Digital space is technological. As such, it makes the world something to be experienced as a symbolic system; at the same time, it also holds the world at a distance. Like every technological space, the digital realm is simultaneously reality and the underworld: it liquefies bodies and separates them from the spirit. As a psychopomp—a guider of souls—digital technology comforts mortals with the promise of life after, and by way of, the body’s disappearance. Insofar as we hold the whole of our identity at the ready in a digital cloud—insofar as we post, store, and retrieve, whenever we wish, all that moves us and makes life worth living—we put ourselves in the hands of the psychopomp. The only thing we still believe in is the omnipresence of our identity inventory. In other words, we get immortality on credit in order to cheat the body—which is forgetful, prone to error, and perishable. We stand at the mercy of the psychopomp.
Yet this ambiguous deity is leading us to Hades—the realm of Orcus, god of punishment. Disembodied as we are, we now pay a price: nothing can be forgotten. All that constitutes our digital identity will haunt us forever. Copied and stored, it spreads over the vast digital domain in its entirety; even if it no longer seems to be there, it can still pop up, like a repressed memory. Omnipresence—the ubiquity of ghosts—is a symptom of x = xⁿ. It cashes in on the threat of Anonymous—payback. “We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”

9. A World with No Beyond

If this book employs religious metaphors, it is not because the authors wish to share any personal preferences, but because the digital world summons forth fantasies of a chiliastic, or apocalyptic, nature—which seem to stand opposed to digital rationality. Where does this strange charge come from? How is it that the machine, as if by magic, evokes figures of thought that are not rational and, indeed, sooner or later assume the status of articles of faith? It’s not so important that the computer occupies a position in the tradition of cosmological proofs of the existence of God—or that Babbage reworked the clockmaker deity of old into a programmer. In historical perspective, digitization has opened a new techno-logos: a continent of thinking that, in a century and a half of existence, has made its power more than evident. If the expression weren’t so hackneyed, one might speak of a paradigm shift. Let us simply observe that a revolution in our way of seeing the world has occurred. In intensity and scope, it equals the emergence of the mechanical worldview during the 1300s—which was not the event of a century so much as the event of a millennium. Needless to say: the term event, insofar as it suggests a pointillist perspective, is misleading, too; after all, continents emerge through a lengthy process. “We discover what we have invented,” Vilém Flusser would say.
More and more, we are coming to realize that figures of thought rehearsed and repeated for centuries on end are falling victim to the digital revolution. In the grip of revolutionary zeal, techno-enthusiasts have declared a historical state of exception: the singularity. Meanwhile—in a kind of shock-induced paralysis—critics lament the soullessness of our brave new world. Both sides, however, appeal to religious modes of thinking—and thereby fail to grasp the historical nature of the process. Unlike oppositions such as blessing and curse or utopia and dystopia, what has been bestowed upon us is hardly a virus sent by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Instead, we face a historical phenomenon—a symbolic form that was made by human beings; thus, it too shall pass.
If the Boolean formula occupies a privileged position in the perspective that has emerged, this is because it makes clear—and as concisely as possible—which of the historical forms we have inherited must be replaced or rethought. The goal of removing the representative from mathematics has occurred on a much greater scale than Boole himself could ever have imagined. When the code of representation was rendered inoperative, a continent of thought charted for centuries started to break apart. What we view as writing, money, labor, knowledge, reproduction, nature, corporeality, power, and politics—the whole land mass of our thinking and our historical consciousness—founders on this formula.
In psychological terms, it is not difficult to understand those who wish not to stand exposed to this fissure in the fabric of time. After all, it means that we have to consign a significant portion of our inherited ideas and conventions to the “dunghill of history.” Stubborn adherence to obsolete figures of thought might explain what would otherwise remain incomprehensible in our history-obsessed age: the fact that the basic formula of computer culture has remained practically unknown—and, conversely, every last relic of religion has come to fasten on the digital world.
Such estrangement has fatal consequences. Instead of acknowledging how digitization shapes and forms our circumstances, we complain and lament, but only the symptoms receive attention. We wonder about how digitization is affecting the labor market, book trade, livelihood of musicians, rates of youth violence, animal husbandry, or whatever else proves to be a problem. This brief list shows how we are not seeing the forest for the trees. Turning a blind eye affords a certain relief: the new—whether blessing or curse—is simply incorporated into our habitual patterns of thought in order to patch up a crumbling worldview. Yet such repression occurs at a price: it means releasing conceptual and terminological monsters into the world—freaks that only plunge our thinking deeper into darkness. In due course, the space inhabited by chimeras and ghosts turns into a seemingly primordial power, an impenetrable jungle.
With that, it seems, a tableau from an earlier time reappears—a vision associated with the emergence of another universal machine, which preceded the computer: automated gearwork. When the mechanical clock struck the hour in the Middle Ages, it was hailed as an apotheosis of reason. Nor was it by chance that the Christian God was retooled and worldly potentates advised to follow the example of His machine in matters of consistency, tact, and punctuality. And yet, when the costs of the triumphant capitalist-mechanistic worldview became clear, enthusiasm waned. The bell tolled, and the day belonged to preachers of repentance: men like Savonarola, who called for a return to the status quo ante. Needless to say, late-medieval society was hardly willing to give up the new achievements. Sooner or later, all the incendiary preaching went up in smoke. Still, society had to go about retrofitting Heaven in order to balance it with the dawning age and all its usury—matters incompatible with the Christian view of Creation, yet vital. Profiteers were granted a place in a newly tenanted mezzanine, Purgatory, where they could work off their sins and finally make it to Heaven, after all. Such a reconfiguration of the inherited worldview does not represent the exception—on the contrary. The fourteenth century witnessed a vast array of chimerical—indeed, schizophrenic—structures of thought, including the sale of indulgences, whose sole purpose was to reconcile incompatible mental universes.
In retrospect, such phenomena may strike us as bizarre—if not altogether incomprehensible. However, if the desire expressed by these chimeras is factored into the equation, we can see that they followed from amalgamating heterogeneous mental spheres in keeping with Jenny Holzer’s apt dictum, “Protect me from what I want.” Nor, for that matter, is such psychopathology limited to dark, medieval times. Today, it is celebrating a veritable resurrection. Take, for instance, data sovereignty—the idea, which emerged in the wake of the NSA scandal, that people have the right to self-determination with regard to their personal information. The concept of data derives from the digital world, a world of simulation. In contrast, the concept of sovereignty comes from the world of political representation. The sovereign is the one above whom supera-neus—nothing higher—stands. It’s not hard to recognize the afterglow of regal majesty here. Inasmuch as the terms are joined, every Internet user has been anointed a royal child of modernity. But if we juxtapose this sublime image with the Boolean formula—which corrodes and undermines identitarian equations—the imbalance is striking: clearly, one may speak of sovereignty only by repudiating the laws of digital space.
Indeed, our stubborn insistence on data sovereignty amounts to an unacknowledged admission that sovereignty has vanished entirely—if it ever existed, at all. By the same token, identity politics points to the fact that identity has become an empty mass to be fashioned and negotiated at will. Both concepts—along with a host of other, fanciful notions—represent magic formulas supposed to cover up the historical rupture that we recognize but cannot accept. Users may enjoy the conveniences of the formula (copy-pasted genderswapping, simulated identities, and so on), but they cannot pay the price. Invoking concepts from the past is supposed to offer protection against the impositions of the present and preserve the illusion that, all in all, nothing has changed. Digital space thus turns into a hinterworld (which Nietzsche fittingly glossed as metaphysics): an outsourced sphere following different laws than those of our reality. As a psychic beyond, the digital universe offers a landing pad for free-floating metaphysical needs. And with that, the schizophrenic constitution of the late Middle Ages returns: willful blindness and repression on a collective scale.
That’s why it’s essential to know the basic formula of the digital: it offers an antidote when misguided metaphysics—metaphysics resulting from misinterpretation—lays hold of rationality and stifles it. As such, our insistence on the Boolean formula is simply meant to mark the minima ratio that human reason must observe.

Martin Burckhardt and Dirk Höfer, All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse

Agostino Arrivabene

Untimely Meditations

Mario Kopić, Preludij – Etide o ljubavi i smrti

PRELUDIJ

U igru svijeta nikada ne stupamo ni prerano ni prekasno. Dok jesmo, dok obitavamo u svijetu, jesmo tu, u igri. U igri sa živima i u spomenu na mrtve.

Dijabolički bezdan između živih i mrtvih jest bezdan unutar svijeta. No nije na površini svijeta. Na površini svijeta postoji linija, linija koja povezuje i ujedno odjeljuje, linija između zemlje i neba. S našeg gledišta, gledišta kao stajališta, ta linija je granica horizonta. Zanemarimo li zemlju, ta linija je granica našega neba. Ali to je samo statički aspekt. Bitno za tu liniju jest da je nikada ne možemo dosegnuti, da nam upravo tada kad nam se čini da smo joj se približili, ona iznenada izmiče. Tako je i s vremenom kao horizontom bivstvovanja. Kako od tu možemo samo gledati na stjecište zemlje i neba, ne možemo ga dotaknuti, a nekmoli preći s onu stranu njega, tako ni sa svojim sada ne možemo nikada sustići, a nekmoli prestići svoje bivstvovanje, bivstvovanje samoga sebe kao bivstvujuću budućnost onog bilog. A u ono bilo, dakle u ono što nije pred očima, što nije nazočno, ali je prisutno, spadaju i naši mrtvi. Bogovi odista mogu pobjeći, ali mrtvi nas ne mogu napustiti. Napuštaju nas, svojom smrću, jedino i samo živi.

Veza između mrtvih i živih je snaga spomena što se rađa iz boli oproštaja. Kao što zemlja i nebo međusobno pripadaju, tvore sim-bol samo na liniji koja ih razdvaja, tako nas i spomen spaja s mrtvima. Spomen na mrtve ne bi bio tako živ ako u njemu ne bismo osjetili vlastitu smrtnost, ako u snazi spomena, u žudnji za (već) umrlima ne bi bila prezentna misao na vlastitu smrt, ako u ljubavi između živih i u ljubavi prema životu ne bi svagda već bio i rez želje za smrću. Želja za smrću ima dva istočnika: smrtni strah i žudnju za spajanjem (s)polova. Taj dvostruki žalac želje za smrti, zbog kojeg je spolna želja – a samo je spolna želja istinska želja – svagda već i smrtna želja, trajno je sjeme ljubavi kao erotske religioznosti i/ili religiozne erotičnosti.

Zato apsurdna nije religija, nije apsurdna vjera kao re-ligio, nego je apsurdno ono nagovještavanje kraja religije što proishodi iz pretpostavke o ukidanju straha pred „prirodnom pojavama“ i „osjećajem nemoći“, kao da ima išta strašnije od smrtnog straha i straha od nemoći što ga čovjek osjeća kao konačno i smrtno biće. Nedomišljenost i nedosljednost tih navjestitelja kraja religije jest u tome da istovremeno nisu navijestili i kraj erotike. Ukoliko su nešto više od ustanka poniženih i uvrijeđenih, komunistička revolucija (communitas kao bogata zemaljska zamjena za siromašni nebeski religiositas) i seksualna revolucija (sexus kao bogata čulna zamjena za nadčulni eros) ne mogu jedno bez drugoga. Dvije su strane istog meta-fizičkog stremljenja: stvoriti carstvo nebesko na zemlji, odnosno stvoriti savršenu zajednicu (komunu), ukinuti sve razlike i stupiti na mjesto Boga (Besmrtnika). Pobijediti ne samo smrtni strah, nego i samu smrt. Postaviti komunu kao vječnu kopulu i život kao permanentni koitus. Promijeniti svijet iz sim-bola u sferu bez dijaboličkog reza u sredini. Riječju, zaboraviti na smrt.

Taj proces, taj juriš u zaborav smrti, u zaborav čovjekova bivstvovanja kao konačna, kao vremenu izručena bivstvovanja, započeo je s platonizmom (→ PLATON). Platonistička Ideja, koja je s onu stranu bivstva/bivstvovanja (epekeina tes ousias) i koja je Pol bez protiv-pola, čisto je Svjetlo, sebe sama osvjetljujuće svjetlo. U tome je temeljna i neukidiva luciferičnost metafizike. Jer ako ukinemo Ideju kao filozofski sinonim za Lucifera, ukidamo i meta-fiziku. A s njom i pjesničku riječ kao poetsku metaforu. Metafore su moguće samo u sjenki Lucifera, odnosno kao čulno sijanje ili zračenje Ideje. Metafora postoji samo unutar metafizike. Metafora i metaforičko mišljenje pripadaju, dakle, bitno metafizičkom, onto-teo-loškom mišljenju, pretpostavljaju razlikovanje između čulnog (aistheton) i nečulnog ili nadčulnog (noeton). Ukoliko je poezija metaforička, a ne simbolička, tada zajedno s filozofijom kao metafizikom prinosi (čisto) Svjetlo i prenosi smrt, pretvara smrt u nešto drugo od smrti (→ DANTE). Kako filozofija tako i pjesništvo (umjetnost) u tom slučaju gube svoju rado-znalost, svoju ljubo-pitljivost i nastoje se preko glorificiranja života preobraziti u čistu volju za život. U volju za život (vječnog) života bez smrti.

Metafizički Bog, koji se među ljudima udomaćio kao Bog kršćanske teologije, Bog kao čisto Svjetlo, kao čista Neskrivenost (Istina), dakle kao posvemašnja negacija skrivenosti i skrovitosti (smrt smrti), nije ništa drugo nego svoj vlastiti Lucifer. U tom je smislu teologija od toga časa, kad je sveto pretvorila u epitet Boga kao najsvjetlijeg i najsvetijeg, kao Svjetla, uništavateljica svetoga kao tajne svijeta. Božje kao sveta, čista glorija nije nešto sveto, nego nešto što hoće biti s onu stranu svetoga kao onog skrivenog, skrovitog u neskrivenom. Želi biti s onu stranu skrivenosti i skrovitosti i svega smrtnog.

Metafizika i kršćanstvo, ukoliko se oslanja na metafiziku, nastoje horizont čovjekove dvo(s)polnosti prevladati i preobratiti čovjekovu horizontalnost, vezu među (s)polovima, u izražaj, u metaforu čiste vertikalnosti. Religija kao ujedinjujuća veza (s)polova tako se pretvara u predanost svetoj (čistoj) gloriji, odnosno božanstvu. U predanost koja uništava oba pola i oba spola. Uništava muškarca, jer nikad ne može dobiti ženu koja bi sasma odgovarala božanstvu, i uništava ženu, koja ne može odgovoriti „snovima“ muškoga i odista postati Ženom. Don Quijote de la Mancha kao Ideja, kao nositelj glorije o Dulcineji, doista nije mogao oživjeti sve dok nije umro kao Alonso Quijano, kao smrtnik. No ujedno je istina i to da kao smrtni čovjek, kao Alonso Quijano, nije mogao umrijeti dok je bio Lucifer (uključujući i ideju o Dulcineji) ili Lučonoša Ideje o Don Quijoteu de la Mancha.

U svjetlu Ideala ne možemo nikad ugledati drugoga kao drugoga, nego svagda i samo kao defektnogdrugog. U tome je luciferičnost sferičnog, odnosno meta-fizičkog pogleda na svijet, čije najstarije i najustrajnije opredmećenje jest pred-stava o Bogu. Vjera u Boga kao čisto Svjetlo ne može biti drugo nego slijepa vjera, vjera slijepa za ljepotu svijeta kao svijeta. Svijet u Svjetlu Boga već je unaprijed zatamnjen (→ DOSTOJEVSKI). Razočaranost nad tim da stvari nisu Stvar sama, to jest Bog, hodi pred vjernikom, pred čovjekovim čuđenjem nad tim da stvari jesu, pred njegovom očaranošću bivstvovanjem stvari kao stvari. Doista pravi vjernik zato želi na onaj svijet, u onostranstvo, k Bogu. Svjetuje mu sveti Augustin: „Ne ljubi u ovom životu, kako ne bi izgubio život vječni“.

No dok Bog znači otcjepljenje i osamostaljenje, zacjeljenje i ovjekovječenje jednog od polova svijeta kao sim-bola, u zrcalu Boga kao Svjetla sim-bolnost se svijeta pokazuje kao božje djelo (Zeus, na primjer, prvobitno ljudsko biće za kaznu siječe napola), a spajanje (s)polova kao nesretna posljedica otcjepljenja i kao vraćanje u prvobitnu cjelinu, ne kao sreća obitavanja na svijetu. Vertikala prema Bogu (ili njegovoj zamjeni, poput Žene), čovjeku njegovo obzorje ne samo da zasljepljuje, nego mu ga, usađujući mu ga u središte srca, i oduzima. S vjerom kao Vjerom u Boga čovjek gubi vjeru u svetu tajnu svijeta: veselje uživanja u svetoj igri svijeta preobraća mu se u potištenost i tjeskobu zbog rđave savjesti. Bog kao Sfera, kao umišljena cjelovita Cjelina, čiji Atmos (Eter) zacjeljuje sve rane svijeta, pa i smrtnu ranu čovjeka, čovjeku ne pruža vjeru, nego ga sili u nevjeru u svijet, u nevjeru u svjetskost svijeta kao svijeta, svijeta kao sim-bola s dijaboličkim rezom u sebi, rezom između suprotstavljenih (s)polova. Time čovjek preko Vjere u Boga, slijep za taj rez, utečući se nadi u besmrtnost i zatvarajući smrt kao škrinju ništine u kovčeg zavjeta s Bogom, oduzima čovjeku njegovu ljudskost, mogućnost „pjesničkog obitavanja na svijetu“ (Hölderlin). Biblijska Pjesma nad pjesmama nije eulogija Bogu, nego pjesma o tajnoj (s)polnosti svijeta kao svijeta.

Ljubav kao ljubav, kao ljudska ljubav, kao ljubav konačnog i smrtnog bića, a ne kao Ljubav, moguća je samo kao prihvaćanje drugog i kao predavanje drugome. U pristajanju na drugoga u njegovoj drugosti, u pristajanju na razliku, i time na dijaboličnost zajedničkog obitavanja, prebivanja, odnosno su-bivstvovanja (→ DERRIDA). Spolnost je ishodište i stjecište erotske religioznosti i/ili religiozne erotičnosti. Spolnost je obzorje unutar kojega mi se drugi i drukčiji pokaže ne samo kao stvar, nego kao lijepa stvar, kao lijepa žena ili lijep muškarac.

Ljubav povezuje, ljubav je religio, odnosno erotična je samo ukoliko je seksualna. Najtajanstvenija, najsvetija je zato seksualnost. Otvorenost u razrez čovjekova bivstvovanja kao su-bivstvovanja, u bezdan čovjeka kao smrtnog bića. Nezaboravnim riječima Georgesa Bataillea iz njegova eseja o Nietzscheu: „Moja mahnitost ljubljenja gleda na smrt poput nekog prozora na dvorište“ (ma rage d’aimer donne sur la mort comme une fenêtre sur la cour). Ekstaza spolnog spajanja nije prividna, zato vjera u ekstatičnost (spolne) ljubavi nije obmana. Obmana je Vjera u Ljubav. U vjeru u ekstatičnost ljubavi spada zato i nevjera u obećanje Ljubavi, u Boga.

Jer ne ljubi ljubav kao ljubav nego ljubim ja ili ljubiš ti. Ljubav je način bivstvovanja čovjeka, a ne same ljubavi, dakako niti način bivstvovanja stvari izvan čovjeka. Ljubav ne spada u kategorijalna određenja stvari, u određenja bivstvujućeg koje postoji unutar svijeta. Ljubav, naime, spada u bit, suštinu čovjeka, u bit čovjeka kao tu-bivstvovanja. Esencija čovjeka kao tu-bivstvovanja je njegova ek-sistencija, a ljubav kao element ek-sistencije je egzistencijal. Kao egzistencijal ljubav pripada jedino i samo čovjeku, bivstvujućem kojemu je zbog njegove smrtnosti u njegovu bivstvovanju stalo do samog tog bivstvovanja. Ljubav se rađa iz bivstvovanja prema smrti, iz bivstvovanja koje se raskriva kroz brigu za bivstvovanje: za vlastito bivstvovanje i bivstvovanje drugoga. Ljubav stoga ne pripada kamenju, ne pripada životinjama, ne pripada ni bogovima. Jer bogovi kao „besmrtnici“ ne poznaju brigu za svoje bivstvovanje. Ljube li, ne ljube na ljudski način. Sve ljudsko im je tuđe, sve ljudsko im je nesvojstveno.

Riječima sholije Maksima Homologeta, zvanog Ispovjednik (Confessor), uz spis Dionisija Areopagita (Dionysios Areiopagites) O mističnoj teologiji (Peri mystikes theologias): „Isus veli: ‘Nitko ne pozna Sina doli Otac, niti tko pozna Oca doli Sin’. Veliki Dionisije nastavlja suprotnošću i kaže da ni sam Bog ne pozna bivstvujuće stvari, ukoliko su bivstvujuće, to jest u svojemu znanju (episteme) on se ne susreće s čulno zamjetljivim stvarima na čulan način, niti s bivstvima kao bivstvima. To nije svojstveno Bogu. Mi ljudi dokučujemo što su čulno zamjetljive stvari pomoću vida, ukusa, dodira; samo one stvari koje su mislima dostupne poimamo preko izučavanja, učenja ili prosvjetljenja. Bog, međutim, ne pozna bivstvujuće stvari ni na jedan od navedenih načina, nego ima sebi primjereno znanje“. Bog, dakle, čulne stvari ne poznaje na čulan način. Čuvstva ne poznaje na čuvstven način. Čuvstva su ljudska, dočim Bog nije ništa čulno, ništa čuvstveno. Stoga i ne ljubi na način na koji ljubi čovjek. Ljubav kakva je svojstvena čovjeku, Bogu nije svojstvena. Ljubiti je, riječju, Bogu nesvojstveno. Govorimo li o božjoj ljubavi, tada moramo biti svjesni da ne govorimo o ljubavi Boga, nego samo o našem preslikavanju ljubavi, o preslikavanju naše ljubavi na Boga.

Znamenje je ljubavi kao ljubavi – nježnost. Bog ne poznaje nježnost, u najboljem slučaju poznaje milosrđe (caritas). Nježnost pak proishodi iz čuvstva ranjivosti drugog bića, iz čuvstvovanja vlastite ranjivosti i prvobitne ranjenosti oba bića: smrtonosne odvojenosti od drugog, od majke koja je dala život.

Znamo da smo svakim danom sve bliže smrti, no čudo da jesmo zbog toga nije ništa manje, dapače, ono svakim danom sve više i više raste. Nema radosti bivstvovanja bez užasa ništine. Čovjek je razapet između njih: ljudski biti znači biti između njih, gledati u bezdan užasa kao užas bezdana (smrt kao škrinju ništine) i radosno se čuditi čudu nad čudima: bivstvovanju. Izbavljenje u radost bez užasa, u područje čiste radosti, u krajolik blaženosti kao radosti s onu stranu bivstvovanja, radosti pod nebom Dobra, koja bi nastupila smrću smrti i uništenjem ništine, nije zato drugo do jedna od mase osionih ideja čovjeka koji neće da bude čovjek. „Nismo grešni samo zato što smo jeli s drveta spoznaje, nego i zato”, kaže Kafka, “jer još nismo jeli s drveta života”. Ne s drveta života kao drveta besmrtnosti, nego s drveta života kao života. Iluzija o Uništavatelju smrti korelativna je iluziji o Stvoritelju iz ništine. Prema riječima Meistera Eckharta: „Pitamo li nekog dobrog čovjeka: ‘Zašto živiš?’, odgovorit će: ‘Dragi moj prijatelju, to ne znam – volim živjeti!’ I ako bi tko pitao život sam: ‘Čemu živiš?’, dobio bi odgovor da se može reći samo Jedno: ‘Živim da bih živio’.”

Smisao života je u životu samom, a ne s onu stranu njega. Otuda potresnost ljepote. I razapetost sjedinjujuće ljubavi: nevjera ne navire odnekud odozdo, nego se nahodi u samoj srži vjere.

Pogledaj dom svoj, anđele. I postat ćeš Orfej.

„On je, naime, glasom pjesme sve veselosti vodio”  (Eshil, Agamemnon).

Mario Kopić, Etide o ljubavi i smrti: Platon – Dante – Dostojevski – Derrida

preuzeto s: https://libretto.rs/?p=92

Anne Carson, Tragedy: A Curious Art Form

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He’ll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him to throw away the anger of all his bereavements.¹ Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother’s funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore off her head and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drove away.

Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits
of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors. They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.

Curious art form, curious artist. Who was Euripides? The best short answer I’ve found to this is an essay by B. M.W. Knox, who says of Euripides what the Corinthians (in Thucydides) said of the Athenians, “that he was born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so.” Knox’s essay is called “Euripides: The Poet As Prophet.”² To be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you. Out of the present the future is formed. The prophet needs a clear, dry, unshy eye that can stand aloof from explanation and comfort. Neither will be of interest to the future.

One thing that was really going on for much of Euripides’ lifetime was war—relatively speaking, world war. The Peloponnesian War began 431 BC and lasted beyond Euripides’ death. It brought corruption, distortion, decay and despair to society and to individual hearts. He used myths and legends connected with the Trojan War to refract his observations of this woe. Not all his plays are war plays. He was also concerned with people as people—with what it’s like to be a human being in a family, in a fantasy, in a longing, in a mistake. For this exploration too he used ancient myth as a lens. Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible. To be present when that happens is Euripides’ playwriting technique. His mood, as Walter Benjamin said of Proust’s, is “a perfect chemical curiosity. ”³

There is in Euripides some kind of learning that is always at the boiling point. It breaks experiences open and they waste themselves, run through your fingers. Phrases don’t catch them, theories don’t hold them, they have no use. It is a theater of sacrifice in the true sense. Violence occurs; through violence we are intimate with some characters onstage in an exorbitant way for a brief time; that’s all it is.

1. Renato Rosaldo, “Grief and the Headhunter’s Rage,” Text, Play, and Story, edited by E.M. Bruner (Washington, D.C.: American Ethnological Society, 1984), pp. 178-195 ↩︎
2. Directions in Euripidean Criticism: A Collection of Essays, edited by Peter Burian (Duke University Press, 1985), pp. 1-12 ↩︎
3. Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (Schocken, 1968), pp. 203-204. ↩︎

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons – Four Plays by Euripides, Preface

Byung-Chul Han, The Terror of Authenticity

There is much talk of authenticity today. Like all of neoliberalism’s advertisements, it appears in an emancipatory guise. To be authentic means to be free of pre-formed expressive and behavioural patterns dictated from the outside. It prescribes that one must equal only oneself and define oneself only through oneself – indeed, that one must be the author and creator of oneself. The imperative of authenticity develops a self-directed compulsion, a compulsion to constantly question oneself, eavesdrop on oneself, stalk and besiege oneself. It thus intensifies narcissistic self-reference.

The compulsion to authenticity forces the I to produce itself. Authenticity is ultimately the self’s neoliberal form of production; it makes every person the producer of themselves. The I as its own entrepreneur produces itself, performs itself and offers itself as a commodity. Authenticity is a selling point.

The striving for authenticity, the striving to equal only oneself, leads to a constant comparison with others. The logic of comparison transforms otherness into sameness, and thus the authenticity of otherness consolidates social conformity: it only permits system-compatible differences, namely diversity. ‘Diversity’ as a neoliberal term is a resource that can be exploited. Hence it contrasts with alterity, which eludes any economic utilization.

Today, everyone wants to be different from others. However, this will to be different enables a continuation of the Same; we are now dealing with a higher-order conformity. Sameness asserts itself by going through otherness; the authenticity of otherness even perpetuates conformity more efficiently than repressive equalization, which is far more fragile.

Socrates as a beloved person is called atopos by his students. The Other whom I desire is placeless; they elude all comparisons. In A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes writes the following about the atopia of the Other: ‘Being Atopic, the other makes language indecisive: one cannot speak of the other, about the other; every attribute is false, painful, erroneous, awkward […].’¹ Socrates as an object of desire is incomparable and singular. Singularity is something entirely different from authenticity. Authenticity presupposes comparability; someone who is authentic is different from others. But Socrates is atopos, incomparable. He differs not only from other people, but also from everything else that is different from other people.

The culture of constant comparison does not allow the negativity of the atopos. It makes everything comparable, that is, the same. Thus it renders the experience of the atopic Other impossible. Consumer society strives to eliminate atopic otherness in favour of consumable, indeed heterotopic differences. In contrast to atopic otherness, difference is a positivity. The terror of authenticity as a neoliberal form of production and consumption does away with atopic otherness. The negativity of the entirely Other gives way to the positivity of the Same, in fact the same Other.

As a neoliberal production strategy, authenticity creates commodifiable differences. It thus increases the diversity of the commodities in which authenticity is materialized. Individuals express their authenticity primarily through consumption. The imperative of authenticity does not lead to the formation of an autonomous, self-possessed individual; rather, it is entirely co-opted by commerce.

The imperative of authenticity engenders a narcissistic compulsion. Narcissism is distinct from healthy self-love, which has nothing pathological about it; it does not rule out love for the Other. The narcissist, however, is blind to the Other. The Other is bent into shape until the ego recognizes itself in them. The narcissistic subject perceives the world only in shadings of itself. This results in a disastrous consequence: the Other disappears. The boundary between the self and the Other becomes blurred. The self diffuses and becomes diffuse. The I drowns in the self. For a stable self only comes about in the face of the Other; but excessive, narcissistic self-reference creates a feeling of emptiness.

Today, libidinous energies are invested primarily in the ego. The narcissistic accumulation of the ego-libido causes a depletion of the object-libido, that is, the libido that occupies the object. The object-libido creates an object attachment that conversely stabilizes the ego. An excessive narcissistic build-up of the ego-libido causes illness. It produces negative feelings such as fear, shame, guilt and emptiness:

But it is quite a different thing when a particular, very energetic process forces a withdrawal of libido from objects. Here the libido that has become narcissistic cannot find its way back to objects, and this interference with the libido’s mobility certainly becomes pathogenic. It seems that an accumulation of narcissistic libido beyond a certain amount is not tolerated.²

Fear results when there is no longer any object charged with libido. The world thus becomes empty and senseless. Owing to the lack of object attachment, the ego is thrown back on itself and broken by itself. Depression is attributable to a narcissistic accumulation of ego-libido.

Freud even applies his libido theory to biology. Cells that only behave narcissistically, that lack eros, endanger the organism’s survival. The survival of the cells also requires those cells that behave altruistically, or even sacrifice themselves for others:

(Perhaps we may also use the term ‘narcissistic’ in the same sense to describe the cells of malignant neoplasms that destroy the organism. After all, pathologists are prepared to accept that the seeds of these growths are present at birth, and to concede that they display features characteristic of embryos.) All of this being so, it would appear that the libido of our sexual drives is one and the same thing as the Eros evoked by poets and philosophers, the binding force within each and every living thing.³

Eros alone animates the organism. The same applies to society; excessive narcissism de-stabilizes it.

The lack of self-esteem that underlies self-harm, the act of cutting oneself, points to a general crisis of gratification in our society. I cannot produce self-esteem myself; I must rely on the Other as a gratifying authority who loves, praises, acknowledges and appreciates me. The narcissistic isolation of human beings, the instrumentalization of the Other and total competition destroy the climate of gratification. To have a stable self-esteem, I am dependent on the notion that I am important for other people, that I am loved by them. It may be diffuse, but it is indispensable for the feeling of being important. It is precisely the insufficient sense of being that is responsible for self-harm. Cutting oneself is not only a ritual of selfpunishment for one’s own feelings of inadequacy that are typical of today’s performance- and optimization-oriented society, but also a cry for love.

The sense of emptiness is a basic symptom of depression and borderline personality disorder. Borderliners are often unable to feel themselves; only when they cut themselves do they feel anything. For the depressive performance subject, the self is a heavy burden. It is tired of itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outside itself, it becomes absorbed in itself, which paradoxically results in an emptying and erosion of the self. Isolated in its mental enclosure, trapped in itself, it loses any connection to the Other. I touch myself, but I only feel myself through the Other’s touch. The Other is instrumental in the formation of a stable self.

The elimination of all negativity is a hallmark of contemporary society. Everything is smoothed out. Communication, too, is smoothed out into an exchange of pleasantries; negative feelings such as sorrow are denied any language, any expression. Every form of injury by others is avoided, yet it rises again as self-harm. Here, too, we find a confirmation of the general logic that the expulsion of the Other results in a process of self-destruction.

According to Alain Ehrenberg, the success of depression is based on a lost connection to conflict. Today’s culture of performance and optimization does not allow us to work through conflicts, which is time-consuming. Today’s performance subject only knows two states: functioning or failing. In this, there is a resemblance to the condition of machines: machines also know no conflict. They either function correctly or are broken.

Conflicts are not destructive; they have a constructive side. It is only from conflicts that stable relationships and identities ensue. A person grows and matures by working through conflict. The seductive aspect of cutting oneself is that it quickly releases accumulated destructive tension without the time-consuming act of working through conflict. The fast relief of tension is handed over to chemical processes; endogenous drugs are released. It works in a comparable manner to antidepressants: these too suppress states of conflict and quickly restore the depressive performance subject to a functioning state.

The addiction to selfies also has little to do with self-love. It is nothing other than the idle motion of the lonely subject. Faced with one’s inner emptiness, one vainly attempts to produce oneself. The emptiness merely reproduces itself. Selfies are the self in empty forms; selfie addiction heightens the feeling of emptiness. It results not from self-love, but from narcissistic self-reference. Selfies are pretty, smooth surfaces of an empty, insecure self. To escape this torturous emptiness today, one reaches either for the razorblade or the smartphone. Selfies are smooth surfaces that hide the empty self for a short while. But if one turns them over one discovers their other side, covered in wounds and bleeding. Wounds are the flipsides of selfies.

Could suicide attacks be perverse attempts to feel oneself, to restore a destroyed self-esteem, to bomb or shoot away the burden of emptiness? Could one compare the psychology of terror to that of the selfie and self-harm, which also act against the empty ego? Might terrorists have the same psychological profile as the adolescents who harm themselves, who turn their aggression towards themselves? Unlike girls, boys are known to direct their aggression outwards, against others. The suicide attack would then be a paradoxical act in which auto-aggression and aggression towards others, self-production and self-destruction, become one: a higher-order aggression that is simultaneously imagined as the ultimate selfie. The push of the button that sets off the bomb is like the push of the camera button. Terrorists inhabit the imaginary because reality, which consists of discrimination and hopelessness, is no longer worth living. Reality denies them any gratification. Thus they invoke God as an imaginary gratifying authority, and can also be sure that their photograph will be all over the media like a form of selfie directly after the deed. The terrorist is a narcissist with an explosive belt that makes those who wear it especially authentic. Karl-Heinz Bohrer is not wrong when he notes in his essay ‘Authenticity and Terror’ that terrorism is the final act of authenticity.⁴

Notes

1. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, transl. Richard Howard (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 35. ↩︎
2. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, transl. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 470f. ↩︎
3. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, transl. James Strachey, in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 179. ↩︎
4. Karl-Heinz Bohrer, ‘Authentizität und Terror’, in Nach der Natur. Über Politik und Ästhetik (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1988), p. 259. ↩︎

Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other – Society, Perception and Communication Today

Translated by Wieland Hoban