THESES ON TRUTH, LOVE, SUBJECTIVITY, HEADLESSNESS, CHAOS, PHILOSOPHY AND ART.
1. In On Certainty from 1949-1951, Wittgenstein showed that there is no reasonable ground not to put one's trust in what is groundless. The language game and the way of living on which our social and scientific evidence is based are without ground. They themselves cannot be grounded in reason. They reach into the groundless abyss. And therefore human beings are left with no other choice than to put their trust in this doubtful certainty which is indubitability itself. Indubitability is dubitable. It is a kind of problematic evidence. Like an invisible veil, it has laid itself over the abyss of chaos and namelessness. One could say that it merges with chaos since it is so inconspicuous, so efficient. "When philosophizing," Wittgenstein writes, "one has to climb down into old chaos and feel well there". In philosophizing, the human subject touches chaos, the non-ground. It maintains an at least problematic contact with it. To feel well in chaos can mean nothing other than to integrate the uncanny, the incommensurable and unviable dimension which it represents into one's way of living. To feel well in chaos is tantamount inhabiting an uninhabitable region or, assimilating oneself to that which is most disturbing. That is the determination of philosophy which Deleuze and Guattari give when they say that "it is always a matter of overcoming chaos with an intersecting plane that traverses it". One inkles how much courage and high spirits (courage can only exist as high spirits) it requires to climb down into the non-ground of chaos in order to erect a plane of evidence over it, for it is a matter of acknowledging the power of chaos whilst minimizing its destructive power for the subject.2. Chaos is the lack of ground or the abyss. It is the dimension which forever precedes the Logos, reason, language and communication. The Logos refers to this abyss. It points to it. The abyss of the Logos cannot be thought as ground. The Logos glides over its own groundlessness. From the outset it is held above the space of absolute secrecy. The Logos constitutes itself as a primary speaking. It is the name of the birth of sense from non-sense. A subject is what keeps contact with non-sense through the Logos and the madness inherent in it without losing itself in this contact to the pure power of chaos. The peculiarity of the subject’s contact with the chaotic abyss, which always also means re-contact, resumption of an original or, more precisely, pre-original intimacy, lies in this hyperbolic self-transgression and self-surpassing in which the subject constitutes itself as the subject of this transgressedness, of a certain self-transcendence. The human being as subject, says Zizek citing Schelling, "is the only creature that is (again) directly in contact with the primal abyss".
3. Chaos is also the name for the infinitude which death is as absolute destruction. To touch chaos means to give space to this destruction in one's thinking and life. The finite subject is only a subject insofar as it extends itself to the dimension of infinity. It is life related primordially to death. It juts out into the space of infinity. Because this is the case, it is a matter of giving the uncanny dimension which death is the status of something self-evident, of taking the non-evidence of death as evidence in order to affirm one's self as a finite subject, for it is this finiteness which lives and bears the infinity which death is. It is not the subject that is infinite, but death. But this infinity only exists for a finite subject. The subject that touches chaos comes back from chaos as if from the "land of the dead". It moves along a border that separates the sphere of life from the non-world of death — between language and silence, finitude and infinitude, knowledge and truth, life and death.
4. Obviously it is a matter of the subject entering into an exchange with chaos and affirming a kind of osmotic or chaosmotic intimacy. A subject (a subject of knowledge and certainty) exists only as the operator of a chaosmosis. To be a subject, the subject must make contact with the chaotic non-ground. Continually it surrenders itself to the unthinkability of what is monstrous — self-surrender which is opening up and resistance at one and the same time. It is an opening up insofar as the subject does not refuse chaos. It grants chaos entry into its thinking. It gives chaos the possibility of stirring up its stocks of knowledge in order to rename them, to reorder and reclassify them. The subject is resistant to this turbulence because it not only threatens its cognitive stocks, its knowledge household, but reaches out directly for the subject itself, for its existence. The subject resists the chaotic whirl to prevent itself by being torn away once and for all into the night of non-knowledge and silence. It opens itself to the monstrous dimension only to return from it. It has thus become a ghostly figure which has survived itself, its own death.
5. One now has to understand that the chaosmotic subject has intercourse with chaos in its monstrosity in a matter-of-fact way, for the subject's relation to chaos is not something subsequent. The subject as such belongs to chaos. It is a primordially surviving subject. For the subject that primordially touches chaos, chaos has its own evidence. Because this is the case, the subject seeks contact with the chaotic non-ground over and over again, despite all the cover-ups, the defusings and neutralizations of opinions and phantasms, as if it were a matter of cultivating a kind of absolute neighbourhood. Chaos has the status of a radical outside, but it shares the one territory with the subject which is the world of immanence, the world without an outside, i.e. without an exterior. Stanley Cavell has spoken of the "uncanniness of the ordinary". That is the uncanniness of what is indubitable and well-known, of shared language, of neighbourly evidence. There is something that threatens and actually shakes the subject more than anything external and alien to it. It appears to the order of what is well known as something unknown, inconceivable and out of place. Like Kafka's Odradek, it does not cease to unsettle its warden. Like a nameless pet (Odradek's name is anything but secured) about which it is not even known whether it is an animal, it afflicts the subject in the innermost interior of its certainties and habits. It does not give the subject any rest, one wants to say. As long as there is a subject, it will be afflicted and unsettled by this namelessness. Something, a non-being is always up to mischief there. There is no reason not to say of this non-being that it is human being itself.
6. Everywhere in philosophy one encounters this undead element which is the subject as such, for philosophy is nothing other than the practice of such survival, of a resistant venture and a ventured resistance. To philosophize means to take on the identity of a subject without subjectivity (and that means also without identity). It means to resist the comfortable indolence of securing one's identity in cultural, social, political and other models. Philosophy is resistance through opening up. And what the philosophical subject experiences as the object of its openness has the character of something unsayable, of silence and closure. Therefore the subject must always go through this double experience. It experiences what cannot be experienced and it touches what cannot be touched. Only in opening up does closure show itself to it and only the experience of closure gives meaning and space to the opening.
7. Art and philosophy exist only as self-precipitancy, as blind, violent, incalculable movement. Art and philosophy are exact exaggerations. And "exaggeration and precision are perhaps just as little incompatible as exaggeration and justice" (A.G. Düttmann). The subject of this new precision is a subject without subjectivity. It experiences itself as a subject of the ocean and as a subject of the desert. The desert, the ocean are the hyperborean zone of endlessness. Every horizon is lost here. The oceanic subject of the desert is the subject without horizon of a primordial removal of barriers. It experiences limitlessness as the proper limit. It is limited by a kind of infinity.
8. Infinitude is not the (theological) eternal. It is the limitlessness of the actual. The actual, however, is not the factual. The factual is only the delimited actual, its limitation. The actual itself is limitless. Here, the hyperborean subject of the desert moves, reels, decides without finding a home. Heidegger calls the hyperborean space of the desert eeriness. The zone of eeriness as the sphere of not being at home is the abyss.
9. The subject of eeriness is the subject of truth. It accelerates beyond the space of certainty and its factual truths. It is the subject that touches truth. Truth is the concept for the absolute limit: the absolute. In Lacan's thinking this limit is called the real. The real is not reality. It signifies its (enabling) impossibility, its inconsistency. The subject of philosophy risks contact with the limit, the border. As a finite subject it contacts infinity. It touches by brushing against the limit, its impossible beyond. The beyond is nothing other than this limit.
10. Blanchot calls the impossible beyond the exterior (le dehors). The subject that touches the limit transcends and transgresses its reality status, its objective, factual identity in order, in contact with the exterior, to go through the (itself not impossible) experience of the impossible. Experience is the experience of pain, of the limit, and means loss. Art and philosophy exist only as the experience of loss of self, as extravagance and radical surrender to the exterior. The subject of extravagance affirms itself as the subject of its pain. Pain opens up the subject to its truth. The truth of the subject is absolute freedom. It is not the subject that is absolute, but its truth. Truth cannot be grounded. Philosophy neither grounds truth, nor is it grounded in truth. And philosophy has nothing to do with establishing, grounding or knowing.
11. Philosophy begins with the experience of the limit of what can be grounded and known. Nevertheless, it is not under any circumstances mysticism or obscurantism. Philosophy refuses the esoterics of facts and also the obscurantism of the ideal. Pain opens the subject to the limit of both the illumination and darkening of knowledge. In pain, consciousness breaks down as the identity of self-consciousness. Pain drives the subject into the truth. Truth is the name for the immeasurable. Truth marks an infinite limit. Truth is nothing other than the conflict between opening and closure. Heidegger calls it the primal strife between lethe and aletheia. This is the word for the compossibility, the monstrous simultaneity or contro-versy of world and earth, the clearing and hiddenness.
12. Truth is not grounded by philosophy and art. Truth can only be asserted. Truth cannot be grounded. Truth eventuates when the subject alienates itself from the symbolic order, its socio- cultural integrity and the phantasmagoria of the imaginary. Truth exists at the moment when philosophy and art (apart from other forms of assertion such as the sciences) touch the impossible (pure virtuality or chaos) in risking a headless transgression of the horizon. Philosophy and art have to assert this touching which is itself a touching of truth. They realize this movement and they defend it. Philosophy and art are forms of realization of truths which do not pre-exist. It is not a matter of finding, discovering or deciphering truths. It is a matter of inventing them, of producing truth. "'Truth' never exists 'in itself' or of itself," so that it could be deciphered, "but comes about through conflict," says Heidegger.
13. Such a truth, insofar as it is the product of an assertive subject in conflict, is therefore not relative in the plainest sense of the word. Philosophy and art assert truth — art asserts truth through asserting form — by evading the relativism of factual truths and the regime of truth and argumentative assurance to which facts are subordinated. Philosophy and art do not assert any facts. They constitute truths which corrupt the order of facts. The place of truth cannot be located in the universe of facts. That is the Utopianism of truth, that it is as such deranged, somewhere else, that it bursts the register of facts, that it insists on another place that is not registered in this register and the topology it represents. Truth is the name for the collapse of systems of truth, of institutions of truth and archives of truth which look after the administration of factual truths, of knowledge. Truth is an excess. It transgresses naked knowledge. It marks the point of extreme restlessness. The touching of truth which the desire for truth in art and philosophy achieves is restless touching of the untouchable. Philosophy and art exist only as this excess.
14. The dimension of truth is the dimension of what is unfamiliar or monstrous. That truth exists means that knowledge and its certainties are limited. Truth is the name of this limitation. The truth refers to the groundless and nameless dimension that is uncanniness. Certainty can only exist in the form of this functional form or way of living which brings the human subject close to monstrous chaos without sacrificing it to the authority of what is unsayable. Therefore it can be said of the subject’s way of living that it is logical because the logos maintains contact with the groundless abyss above which it is held. There are such things as knowledge and certainty and logic, but they themselves are entrusted to what is unknowable, uncertain and illogical. Philosophy was never anything other than the attempt to mediate what is problematic: reason with non-reason, finitude with infinitude, being with becoming, the ordinary with the monstrous, the sayable with the unsayable. That is the dialectic of the movement of Western thought in which what cannot be mediated tries to find a mediation without coming to any valid solution.
15. Transcendence is the essence of a subject without essence. The subject is the ecstatic subject of a primordial self-transgression and self-surpassing. It is the subject of this ontological nakedness and poverty, to be nothing but a subject of emptiness, indeterminacy and lack of essence. This subject appears in the thinking of the twentieth century as the subject of homelessness (Heidegger), as the subject of the exterior (Blanchot), as the subject of freedom, i.e. of nothingness (Sartre), as the subject of ontological lack (Lacan), as the subject of chaos (Deleuze/Guattari), as the subject of de-subjectivation and self-care, as the subject of the other (Levinas), as the subject of différance (Derrida) and as the subject of the event of truth (Badiou). It is a subject whose subjectivity seems to equate with the dimension of the non-subjective, of nothingness, a subject without subjectivity. To be a subject means to have transgressed oneself toward an exterior, an otherness and impossibility in order to affirm oneself as the subject of transgression.
16. The transcendence refers to the subjectivity, the non-substantial being of the subject. There is something resembling a subject only as the subject of a constant self-transgression and self-surpassing. The subject crosses itself out as subject. The subject is what affirms itself as the locus of this crossing-out, of this becoming, the restlessness of a subject without subjectivity. "If one chooses for the being that we are ourselves the term 'subject'," says Heidegger, "then it holds that transcendence designates the essence of the subject, that it is the basic structure of subjectivity. The subject never exists previously as a 'subject' in order then, in case there are no objects present, also to transcend, but rather to be a subject means to be a being in and as transcendence".
17. The subject cannot settle in the real, in truth. It is the subject of an unshared restlessness, hyperbolic acceleration, atomic nervousness, subject of essential or hyperborean solitude. The real world is the uninhabitable world, the world of truth which the subject traverses without belonging to it. The real names the pure abyss of its subjectivity. This is the pre-ontological nothingness to which the subject remains related as its abyssal ground, the non-ground of its ontological indeterminacy and irreducible lack of focus, the hole of freedom, as Sartre says. The subject of the real is the subject of this fathomlessness and indeterminacy. It is the subject of ontological poverty, subject without an identity-constituting, transcendent or teleological regulative.
18. Real subjects will be subjects of a truth other than the truth of certainty. This other truth is another name for the immanent limitation of the sphere of certainty. Truth is what is contraposed at any point in time to certainty and to any form of knowledge and non-knowledge in the name of another enlightenment, as Nietzsche so often says, of another philosophy or another thinking that thinks otherwise. The subject of certainty is the subject of the reality of facts. Certainty is necessarily the certainty of facts. Truth is what interrupts the possibility of certainty, that is, of reassuring oneself in the universe of facts by believing in facts. The subjects of this interruption are "incommensurable subjects" of incommensurability, "subjects without subject and without inter-subjectivity", solitary hyperborean singularities of uncertainty whose truth is associated with making shared truth, that is, the certainty of the subject, impossible, subject-singularities without subjectivity.
19. The hyperborean world is the world of truth as long as we understand by truth the zone of incommensurability, of the fighting out of the conflict between light and darkness, recollection and forgetting, opening and closure, aletheia and lethe. The hyperborean world of truth is the sphere of this conflict, the space of diaphora, which as hypo-, inter- and hyper-sphere borders the universe of facts on all sides. Diaphora is the Greek word for strife or primal strife, as Heidegger translates it. Diaphora outlines what is without outline, the immeasurable, the primordial disorder of beings in their uncountable diversity. Truth is therefore neither propositional truth, nor does it bend, like correctness (orthotes), to the law of countability, to calculus and calculation. Truth as diaphora means nothing other than that which evades calculation from the outset, which makes calculation impossible and qualifies it as a making-impossible. The world of truth borders the space of calculability and values; it opens it through limitation by inscribing in it an infinite limit, an absolute overtaxing. The world of truth is the world of the impossible. The hyperborean subject enters this world not without a certain experience of loss. It risks its entire property, all of its capacities. It loses itself, its Self, in touching this exterior that destroys every certainty of identity.
20. A touching of truth always happens when the subject of this touching is forced to accelerate beyond its actual self, when it loses itself in contact with the non-contactable in the endless sea of undecidability. And yet, this losing of itself is anything but negative or arbitrary. The subject loses itself in order to constitute itself as the subject of self-loss, of the insecurity of identity. The subject of self-loss is the hyperborean subject of a touching of truth which at the same time includes self-constitution, self-invention and self-assertion. To touch the world of truth means to experience its limits and to affirm this experience of its own limitation as the opening up to another self. Truth-world is a name for the irreducible chaos, the pure nothingness of pure transcendental virtuality. The virtual is not illusory, and the transcendental is more than merely a naked structure. The transcendental dimension is, as Zizek emphasizes following Deleuze, the "infinite potential field of virtualities out of which reality actualizes itself". The world of truth is the world of transcendental virtualities, pre-ontological world of pure noumena which, in contradistinction to the actualized phenomena, have to be thought "not merely as appearances" (as positive ontological entities), "but as things in themselves". The thinking of noumena, insofar as it is only thinkable as an intellectual intuition independent of the receptiveness of the forms of sensuality, space and time, is a thinking of the unthinkable. To think the unthinkable is what we call a touching of truth; it is to make contact with the non-contactable, to touch the untouchable.
21. The hyperborean subject is the hyperbolic subject of the love of truth. It loves, it asserts and it defends a truth which destabilizes its objective (socio-political, cultural, etc.) identity. This is what distinguishes it from the politicized subject of opinion. It denies itself the comfort and security of doxa in the loving assertion of truth, for the truth which this subject defends is anything but certain. Certainty (certitudo) exists only on the side of doxa, of sound common-sense and its images of itself and the world which are always conservative in their values. What distinguishes truth from certainty is that it is as such deranged. The space of truth, of diaphora, of undecidability, of chaos, is the space of an irreducible, primordial derangement into which the subject finds itself admitted originarily. To be a subject means to put itself into an explicit relation to this truth which 'is' equally untruth, equally lethe (hiddenness) and aletheia (unhiddenness). It is this equally, this uncanny simultaneity and equality or "equiprimordiality of truth and untruth" which holds the subject in suspense from the outset. The subject of this monstrous simultaneity is the subject of restlessness. It experiences its being as the arena of this conflict-ridden unification of what cannot be unified, of the compossibility, the compatibility of death and life, beginning and end, origin and horizon.
22. The assertion and love of truth happen when the subject takes on the burden of this compossibility without making itself passive in relation to this ontological heritage. It is the drama of this inheritance which the subjects of opinion evade by privileging certainty before truth. To concede to certainty this ontological privilege means to allow the phantasma of some kind of harmony to take the place of this originary conflict. Certainty will always co-operate with a kind of obscurantism of self-tranquillization. It makes a coalition with the anxiety-ridden, sentimental or simply mystifying tendency of the subject of opinion to do everything possible to substitute the disturbing experience of undecidability (of truth, which is at the same time untruth) with some kind of construed idyll, with a metaphysics of self-tranquillization.
23. The essence of the subject lies in its transgression and surpassing of its essence. It corresponds to its essence by interrupting the logic of essence. The subject is the catastrophic subject of a primordial interruption. The "uncanniness" of the human subject, according to Heidegger, lies in the circumstance that the human being "is a katastrophé, a turning around, which turns it away from its own essence. The human being is within [the totality of] beings the unique catastrophe". The catastrophe, the turn-over, the turn or the counter-swing, the turning against, or undecidable, as Derrida says, or the indistinguishable (Deleuze) prevent, as names for the essence of the human being, the possibility of determining its essence. The essence of the subject seems to lie therein, without being its determination of essence. The subject is separated from itself (from its essence, its being, its subjectivity) by an obviously irreducible distance. Subjectivity cannot be led back to the subject. The circumstance that the human being as subject is to deinotaton, the most uncanny being, refers to this ontological difference. It refers to the abyss between being and beings: physis, the event of propriation, beyng, the difference that holds sway, the diaphora. The subject is torn into this abyss. It is torn apart by it. It is the subject of a radical self-distancing. It is the distance and this abyss which holds it apart from its being (its subjectivity), which makes it almost nothing or allows it to reach into nothingness, into the abyss of its essence. The 'subjectivity' of the subject (without subjectivity) is nothingness.
24. Art as the assertion of truth through the assertion of form is only possible and necessary in the dimension of real unfreedom which is the order of facts, of symbolic and imaginary constructions. Art exists only in relation to that which irreducibly restricts, negates or endangers it as art, i.e. as the assertion of freedom. Objective unfreedom is the element in which the subject of art erects and holds itself as the subject of freedom. The formalism of freedom cannot be reduced to the dialectical conflict between particularism and universalism, objective unfreedom and virtual freedom, because the assertion of form by art suspends the dimensions of reality and ideality to an equal degree. Idealism (of freedom) and realism (of unfreedom) are false alternatives which in any case promote obscurantism, i.e. simplicity, instead of generating truth.
25. Perhaps there is art and philosophy only as an exaggeration, that is, as hyperbolism, as self-acceleration, as headlessness and blind excess. Perhaps this is the case because the human subject itself represents an exaggeration, a hyperbolic element. What is human being? What is philosophy? What is art? What does it mean to affirm an exaggeratedness, to undersign for its blindness, impotence and overtaxing as a subject of exaggeration? Can art and philosophy be such signatures of a subject that starts to assume responsibility for its overtaxing and its innocence and blindness? What is responsibility as excess and for the excess, for the exaggeration? What is the subject that constitutes its life out of this exaggerated responsibility?
26. You have to pay. That is the first principle of the hyperbolic economy. It always costs more than you can pay. You always pay too little in art and also in thinking. And yet it is necessary to pay more than necessary, more than you can actually pay. The subject of art overflies its own possibilities. It comes into contact with the impossible.
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. In the Deleuzian arrangement, art, philosophy and science are ways of touching chaos. In Badiou's writings, the arrangement is extended to politics. Ultimately, even love, every genuine decision is a touching of truth. The subject of decision, however, is the subject as such, the subject in general. The question concerning the touching of truth must be extended to the question concerning the subject. The subject qua subject is a touching of truth. To be a subject means to come into contact with a truth. There is something resembling a subject only as a subject of truth. The subject neither speaks the truth or the untruth, nor is it primarily in truth, in the opening-up of being, as Heidegger calls it. The subject is that which experiences the limit of the truth of opening-up as well as the limitedness of propositional truth, that is, ultimately, the truth of the symbolic order.
30. The experience of the limit and of limitedness (of the delimitation of the actual as factual truth) is a touching of the untouchable. The subject is not touched or stirred up by a truth but rather performs the touching at the moment of decision in favour of a truth which does not pre-exist as such. It prefigures and constitutes the object or, more precisely, the target of its affirmation by identifying itself with it. The identification of the subject with its truth is an act of self-obligation, of loyalty, as Badiou calls it. The identification with a truth is a transgression and suspension of the order of identified and identifiable facts because there is only true identification through a suspension of the principle of identity. The subject of identification touches the impossible. It coalesces with the ungraspable. It reaches toward the nameless. It casts itself toward a faceless future. It throws itself toward the indeterminate. The subject of this self-casting is the Icarian subject of the sun. One will not be able to absolve it from a kind of constitutive or structural hubris. Gadamer speaks of the "Icarian flights of speculative philosophy" which make of the subject of flight an Icarus who accelerates above and beyond the determinacy of facts and the paternal logos.
31. The subject of truth is an Icarian subject that overflies itself and the facts. In the flight of truth it overflies the untruth of its and 'the world's' reflective determinations based on identification with what is external. It moves away from its factual status in order to define its self as this giving-way of its self, as this distancing from its factual components constituted by something alien. The subject of truth is a definitional subject. Its identifications are definitions — hazardous, affirmed assertions. It is the subject of assertions and self-assertion. It affirms and shapes and formats itself in the assertion. It lives its assertions as a touching of truth. It makes these contacts with truth into a life style. And yet, this life style, as Zizek rightly emphasizes, is above all an "excess of life". The subject comes into contact with what is unliveable, with the limit of life itself. Only in touching this limit, which includes a kind of experience of death, does the subject live an authentic life. "Thus when Hölderlin wrote that to live means to defend a form, this form is not simply a life style but the form of an excess of living, the way in which this excess inscribes itself violently into the texture of life." What is defined in Heidegger's Being and Time as resoluteness ... and what Foucault will later call subjectivization as desubjectivization have isomorphic ontological structures. Both concepts designate the self-constitution of the subject or of Dasein in the act of its self-surpassing or in the act of tearing itself away from itself in transgressing itself, which is the act of touching the limit of life.