AN ACROBATIC BODY CATALOGUE: PALOMA VARGA WEISZ (2004)
Catalogue Paloma Varga Weisz (2004)
The withdrawal of the human being has already begun. The subject in human being is accelerating on the line of departure from the human being. It draws the trace of an exertion which tries to turn the world and the self upside down by giving way to an acrobatic inclination: the desire for a momentous breakthrough of boundaries or for ecstasy in which the ambition of the acrobat can be recognized and also the violence of an aggression turned against itself.
Perhaps Paloma Varga Weisz is inventing a new, unknown body, an intensive body that announces its own absence, the vanishing of its functions, the decomposition of its limbs. It is an acrobatic body of constant turning away from the self, a body that stages its presence as a kind of essential instability. The subject of this body dwells in its own border. It keeps contact with the quaking of the exterior to protect itself against overly hasty identifications. It is shaken by animal affects, by feminine, masculine, childlike, historical and mythical affects. It is the arena of the crossing of these affects and the subject of care for their order. It wants to constitute itself as the subject of its dreams, of the most daring hopes and the unreservedness of its desire.
The subject must assert its existence against the forces which deny it, endanger it or make it impossible. It is the subject of this self-assertion, subject of resistance and of autopoietic styling of its existence. In his last two books, L'usage des plaisiers and Le souci de soi, Michel Foucault made it into the arena of the interference between the ethical and the aesthetic. Self-aestheticization seems to correspond to the proper call for ethical self-determination. The subject gives itself its own form.
Processes of subjectivization are such processes of giving oneself existence and form. In them, the subject comports itself towards itself by casting itself toward an image of its possible self that is still unknown. It lets up from itself in order to become something different from what it is. It traverses its established identities like non-binding shells without any substance because the substance of the subject resides in nothing other than its substancelessness. Its ethics of self-determination is an ethics of indeterminacy. Because the subject does not have any transcendental or religious, i.e. substantial, determination, it also cannot miss its destination. It moves towards itself by turning away from itself, i.e. from its hypothetical substantial self. To be a subject therefore means keeping to the line of turning away from itself. The subject twists and turns itself toward an indefinite direction. It affirms this turning and twisting as its authentic form of movement. This form is authentic because it does not have any guarantee from transcendent or transcendental principles. The form hovers over the abyss of an elementary lack of essence. In the act of subjectivization, the subject relates itself to this fundamental void or openness which is the space of its freedom for responsible shaping of the self.
The subject of aesthetic self-forming is the subject of its own freedom and responsibility. The responsibility of the subject of care for itself is not based on any morality. On the contrary, it contradicts any conceivable morality. The ethicalness of care consists in resisting the temptations of morality which in any case would mean making things easier for the subject. "What is our ethics; how do we produce an artistic existence; what are our processes of subjectivization that cannot be reduced to our moral codes?"
The ethical, aesthetic self-constitution of the self or the subject is a warlike and necessarily violent act. The self interrupts itself, its 'symbolic', moral, socio-cultural self. It loses its self as a subject for the moment of a reinvention of its self. It traverses the zone of indeterminacy, a dimension beyond knowledge and power. But this traversal is not therefore itself without violence and power. It is violent in a pre-coded sense. It implies the sacrifice of the coded self and it sacrifices at the same time any 'knowledge' of its future. The self casts itself toward its unknown shadowy outline; it exhausts itself in the moment of a destructive self-constitution. It casts by performing a casting of the self to be in new, unknown modes. It produces unimagined modes of being, of living, of the self. It creates itself anew. It risks the uninhibitedness of pure becoming. It invents obscure modalities of resistance, of self-erection and presence. It practises a new concept of waging war. In bringing forth itself, it brings forth its own type of resistance, its own art of war, its own style, its own form of presence and its affirmation.
In his Leibniz lectures in the summer semester of 1928, Metaphysical Principles of Logic, Heidegger touches on the "question of ethics". Fundamental ontology as developed in Being and Time is not the whole of metaphysics. It has to be supplemented by a metontology. Only the unity of fundamental ontology (which encompasses the analysis of existence and the analysis of the temporality of being, the question of being proper) with metontology (which Heidegger likewise connects to the question concerning the totality of beings as well as the recoil of ontology onto existence, metontology being "also the domain of the metaphysics of existence") provides the full concept of a possible metaphysics. Being needs human being, Dasein, as the locus where it strikes. Dasein is the place where being eventuates. "There is being only when Dasein understands being." Dasein's understanding of being is the condition of possibility for being at all.
The question concerning the sense of being per se must be preceded by questioning the sense of the being of Dasein. It takes its starting-point from Dasein and it must return to this starting-point. Heidegger calls it an "inner necessity that ontology boomerang back to where it set out from". This is the definition which Being and Time provides of philosophy as such: "Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology proceeding from the hermeneutics of Dasein which, as the analysis of existence, has tied the end of the thread of all philosophical questioning to where it arises and to where it boomerangs back.")
Without allowing itself to be reduced to an anthropology or an ontic Weltanschauung, fundamental ontology, including metontology, must boomerang back into concrete existence. As Heidegger will explain in the Letter on Humanism, existence is neither the "reality of the ego cogito" nor is it the "reality of the subjects who act with each other and for each other and so come to themselves", but rather it is "ek-static dwelling close to being".
From this proximity a certain obligation or necessity for action in a possible authenticity can be derived. "Only those who understand this art of existing, of treating what has been individually grasped as what is simply unique for their actions, and at the same time are clear about the finiteness of this action understand finite existence and can hope to attain something in this existence. The art of existing is not self-reflection, which is an uninvolved hunt to dig up motives and complexes from which one gains reassurance and a dispensation from action; rather it is solely the clarity of action itself, the hunt for genuine possibilities."
The topic of metontology seems to imply an entire art of existing, as Heidegger says, and a theory of action, indeed, a kind of ethics which cannot be separated from the problem of a general ontology. Dasein is ethically distinguished from other beings by the fact that it always already understands being and from this understanding of being creates the possibility of explicitly accepting it and grounding it in an action or a deed. The ethicalness of Dasein which understands being is expressly characterized by Heidegger as "guardianship, that is, the care for being".
Care for itself (we recall that Dasein is that being which "in its being is concerned with its own being") is inseparable from the ontological care for the truth of being as a whole. "As the ek-sisting being, the human being withstands Dasein by taking the Da as the clearing of being into its 'care'".
The subject of care is the subject of self-production; it is the autopoietic subject. Foucault recognizes in the urge for self-improvement which constitutes this subject the power to constitute itself, to constitute its self in contact with the exterior. For, care for oneself is nothing other than care for the self which is threatened with being pulverized between the violence of the exterior and the forces of mere superficial externality (of doxa, prejudices, the games of social living). It is nothing other than the care for the line of separation between these forces. It is a kind of absolute resistance which resists in two directions — against the naked pre-reflexive chaos or exterior, the space of silence, and also against the dimension of nihilistic accumulation of sense, meaning or idle talk, the social sphere. The subject has to confront itself with the banality and untruth of everyday life and also with the madness of a deeper indifference which dominates the non-sense of the pre-ontological order.
As the subject of care, it begins to erect itself as a force in the midst of other forces. It steps into the process of subjectivization. It constitutes itself as the power of autopoiesis. By paying attention to itself in making itself the object of its care, it becomes the subject of this movement of becoming a subject. Deleuze calls this Foucault's "artistic will"; "subjectivization is an artistic operation".
In the space of impossible subjectivity — "There is no subject, but a production of subjectivity; subjectivity has to be produced when the time has come precisely because there is no subject." —, the subject constitutes itself as the process of its self-invention. Care for itself is the name for this never-ending process in which the subject tries to gain control, domination over itself. It is the name for a form of existence of the most extreme restlessness, even when it assumes the appearance of stoic composure. Subjectivity exists only in the mode of a certain agitation. The subject of autopoiesis is the subject of an absolute turbulence.
The subject of self-constitution, of freedom and emancipatory self-elevation is the subject of irreducible conflicts. It experiences itself as a conflict. There is only something resembling a subject as the limiting case of ontological self-consciousness, as the collapse of self-evidence of the traditional Cartesian, phenomenological or hermeneutic conceptions of consciousness. As the subject of self-elevation, it begins to erect itself in the midst of history, in the midst of the specificity of an historical, political, economic, cultural context. It begins to struggle against what is merely external to it, against what is merely superficial without having the value of an essential exterior. It fights in this struggle of the self against everything that makes it into an object, the product of alien expressions of the will, of factual determinations. The self-erection of the subject against itself is therefore at first connected with the relativization, qualification, restriction or neutralization of its objective components.
The subject of self-erection does not cease defending itself against its reduction to its naked status as an object. It defends itself against becoming a thing, against the reification of its being by the movements which establish sense and values in history. It has to free itself of this history without being able to leave the universal space of history to which it is compelled to belong. The subject is thus the subject of an essential contradiction, of an irreducible paradox, if you will. The question concerning how one becomes a subject, the problem of self-constitution of a subject of factual selflessness insofar as it touches upon the motif of the constitutive power, the construction of a new ontological, political and social order, the possibility of an ontology of self-liberation, as Toni Negri says, is articulated in the space of this paradox, in the dimension of the irresolvable contradiction which separates the subject of absolute freedom from itself as the subject of objective impotence.
Translated from the German by Michael Eldred.