AFFIRMATION OF CHAOS: ART & PHILOSOPHY (2008)
(Excerpt)I want to answer three questions:
1) What is philosophy?
2) What is art?
3) What is the relationship between art and philosophy?
1) Philosophy keeps as far as possible from the phantasma of full speech, of the logos of the certainty of facts or doxai. Philosophy exists only as long as it blocks itself off from the phantasma of self-possession, as long as it executes a movement of primordial self-expropriation, as long as it grasps that what is ungraspable dwells in the heart of the logos itself. The logos is openness to chaos; the logos-subject is only close to itself in being outside itself, beyond itself. That is the madness of the logos, its hyperbolism, that it exists only in touching its limits. "The human being," writes Hans Blumenberg, "is at its origin bound to the principle of superfluity, of luxury. The upright posture is luxurious from its first moment: to see what is not yet present, what does not yet possess any acute necessity, to exercise prevention in relation to that which is only an incorporeal possibility, a potential threat or enticement, that is always something of exorbitant expense and not merely incidentally also the beginning of all aggression as well as the possibility of its end". The logos-subject includes this excess, this exaggeration, this too-much, the transcendence of its momentary situation. A subject exists only as this hyperbolism of a "nature" shooting beyond itself.
Philosophy is not anachronistic, it is diachronistic; it traverses its socially, politically, economically, culturally overdetermined times. Philosophy knows its own velocity. Sometimes its acceleration lies in aloofness, in a certain distance from the problems of the times. Sometimes philosophy accelerates by slowing down, by decelerating or playing dead. The power of philosophy lies in this acceleration which is something other than the opposite of deceleration. The self-acceleration of philosophy means its opening to the dimension of the undecided, of the future, of contingency. The self-affirmation of the philosophical subject as the subject of this opening is a necessarily over-hasty affirmation. The subject affirms what it does not know. The self-acceleration of philosophy is such a precipitancy. Who wants to claim that precipitancy does not exist also as an abstinence from its times, as a discretion vis-à-vis the Zeitgeist, as long as its compulsions to accelerate reinforce the fixedness of established realities? Philosophy exists only as a philosophy of assertion. An assertion is always over-hasty, always exaggerated and headless; and yet it knows its own precision.
Philosophy is a form of living that tears the subject beyond its certainties. The subject accelerates beyond its objective reality in the established structure of reality. It affirms itself as the authority for actions which it never quite controls. Philosophy’s experience of time is the experience of this lack of control, of fragility, of ontological indeterminacy of its times and reality. At no point in its history was philosophy concerned with formulating views about its times. That would be journalism, perhaps literature. Philosophy begins with the refusal to be a matter of views. It transcends literature and journalism. Its conception of itself includes the transgression of always reactive particularisms expressing opinions and the economies of interests. That is the philosophical universalism which one misrecognizes when one does not grasp that its power resists the power of relativisms as an assertion, rather than as a proof or opinion or ideal. Philosophical universalism does not have anything in its hands. It reaches for the ungraspable and it defends this lack of property as its only possession.
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