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THE OBSCURANTISM OF REASON 6TH LECTURE AT THE BIJLMER SPINOZA-FESTIVAL: MAY 7, 2009 BY MARCUS STEINWEG (ABSTRACT)

THE BIJLMER SPINOZA-FESTIVAL
AN ARTWORK BY THOMAS HIRSCHHORN
http://www.thebijlmerspinozafestival.nl/_home/home.html

In his Critique of Pure Reason from 1781/87, Kant pronounced a certain prohibition to fly. It is directed against the so-called dogmatic, pre-critical metaphysics of Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, etc. Philosophy, Kant says, cannot deal with God or the immortal soul like the visibility, the phenomena of everyday life. God, the soul, are not visible. They are not mediated by sensuousness, that is, by subjective forms of intuition. Thinking, however, according to Kant, is thinking in concepts, whose content is pre-given by sensuousness, by the capacity to receive. A thinking which overflies sensuousness is not permissible because it is empty.
The philosophical assertion relates to this lack of a hold, to this void. Therefore it can be called a wild affirmation deprived of its rights because the subject of this affirmation is itself empty, that is, an abyssal subject of the void, of the infinite space of the desert.1 It is the subject of this ontological nakedness and poverty, to be nothing but a subject of the void, of indeterminacy and a lack of essence. This subject crops up in the thinking of the twentieth century as the homeless subject (Heidegger), as a subject of the exterior) (Blanchot), as the subject of freedom or nothingness (Sartre), as the subject of a lack of being or the real (Lacan), as the subject of chaos or becoming (Deleuze/Guattari), as the subject of desubjectivization and care for the self (Foucault), as the subject of the other (Levinas), as the subject of différance (Derrida) or as a subject of the universal and the truth (Badiou). It is a subject whose subjectivity seems to coincide with the dimension of the non-subjective. A subject without subjectivity.

To be a subject means to have surpassed oneself toward an exterior, an otherness and impossibility in order to affirm oneself as a subject of transgression. As the subject of this contact, it is the subject of self-transgression to the dimension of an otherness that a priori undermines every concept of self and identity. It is a subject without any fixed identity that constitutes itself in the act of (re)-contacting its own abyss of essence as an ontological deviation, that is, as an originary disturbance of the actual world, of the positive order of being.