THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND ART (2003)
With Thomas Hirschhorn I will work on the Road-Side-Giant-Book-Project in 2004 for Minneapolis. It is a collaboration between philosophy and art.What is philosophy? What is art?
PHILOSOPHY and ART are two modalities to be in the world. They are two ways to exist in this one world without exit. They are ontological movements of LOVE.
The greek verb philein means to love, to desire. The philosopher is a lover. To love in the way the philosopher loves means to fight. The philosopher is a fighter. He is fighting for what he is loving. He is fighting for his love. He tries to conquer the object of his desire. The philosopher is a conquerer and the only weapon he has is his love. The philosopher is a fighter armed with nothing than this hyperbolic desire: the DESIRE OF THE REAL, the passion for the reality of his love.
The love of the real is a love without sentimentality. It is a non-kitschy love of a subject without illusions. The subject of love is without illusions, but it is not a subject of disillusionment. The disillusioned are nothing then narcissistic subjects that do not allow themselves to be deceived. They are subjects that draw their self-confidence from lack of courage in view of what disillusions. The disillusioned are without courage.
The SUBJECT OF LOVE is the subject of courage. Courage is the courage of being not disillusened. The love of the philosopher is the non-disillusened and non-narcisstic love of a subject that wants to make the experience of the other. That is the experience of the NEW.
Philein, to love, means to be open for this experience. An experience is something not totally controllable. The philosopher is the subject of a non-controllable situation. He is “object” of this situation in this sense. He is the subject of an objective self-desubjectivation. That means: the subject of love is a subject that looses itself in the contingency, the non-controllable nature of the object of his love. But it remains still as a SUBJECT. It is the subject of the affirmation of this lost. The subject realizes its sovereignty by the affirmation of a lost that constitutes its SUBJECTIVITY.
To love means to erect myself in front of the other that is more powefull than me. To love means to risk my identity as a subject by making the experience of desubjectivation. It means to be another than you “are”.
The subject of love is the subject of freedom and responsibility. Freedom and responsibility are indivisible. Being determinated, acting in a prefigured context, does not mean not to be free. The dimension of non-sovereignty is at once the dimension of eternal freedom, absolute sovereignty. This sovereignty is not the sovereignty of the traditional philosophical subject of self-transparency (the subject that is supposed to be the subject of German Idealism). It is the SOVEREIGNTY OF A SUBJECT WITHOUT SUBJECTIVITY. Of a subject without head. I want to call this subject a SINGULARITY.
A Singularity is a subject of continual self-exaggeration. It is the hyperbolic subject of its own limit, subject of permanent self-over-stimulation and self-acceleration at this limit which is another name of its namelessness, its freedom and responsibility. Thought as abyss and desert, namelessness brings the subject in front of its impossible self. It is the subject of this impossibility, subject of the desert. It overtakes and leaves itself and it returns again in the desert. It exhausts itself as subject of responsibility and raises itself as subject of its own will. It squanders itself for its rage.
Singularities are mutants, subjects of their self-creation, subjects of becoming. Without name means also: without head. The nameless are the headless subjects of undecided subjectivity. To be headless means to be without implicit orientation, without transcendental rule, without religious destination, without transcendental telos. The subject of headlessness is the hyperbolic subject of an impossible self-certainty rushing headlong. It lurches in an infinite emptiness. It accelerates in the dark. It is an essentially blind subject determined by non-vision.
Philosophy and art are two figures of this HEADLESS, NAMELESS and BLIND love-movement. The GIANT-BOOK-PROJECT should be an attempt to realize this movement under non-philosophical and non-artistic conditions. It is a project that needs the power and intensity of what I want to call the FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND ART.
Berlin, November 18, 2003
MARCUS STEINWEG