Showing posts with label Novalis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Novalis. Show all posts

Sunday, 29 November 2009

Supply and Demand


1. Great Works


Krishna speaks of three worlds like the Zohar (Kabbalah).  The wise ones are also those who hold the world together.  They keep the circle of sacrifice-action-nourishment rolling.  Sacrifice is negative supply.  In the economy of sacrifice, what one does not have is an asset.  Dostoyevsky accumulated many such sacrifice assets during his prison days, but only with the help of an aloof brother who did not write him during his four years of hard labor in the Siberian 'katorga' camp and ignored his repeated demands for money and petitions.  His brother was an agent of the gods of sacrifice - those cosmic auditors who pay particular attention to the levels of necessary obstruction, harm and misery upon which great works depend.  Great works notoriously thrive upon fragile relationships.  For one reason or another, usually meta-economical, such works can only be sustained by a faulty and inadequate source.  Most of Dostoyevsky's letters from Siberia are pleas for some kind of sustenance.  Books for example.  Hegel, Kant, French economists, literary journals, anything and all the details.  He had an insatiable craving for histories of the Church and Church Fathers although he considered himself a sceptic.   Dostoyevsky's favorite lamentations are those designed to move his brother to request his transfer to a post in the Caucasus, "at least it's in Russia".  The land beyond the Ural is mere administered territory, to be banished to that part of the Russian Empire is to be cut off from life itself.  His brother remains admirably unmoved.  Dostoyevsky's eloquence is wasted on him, a valuable additional sacrifice.


Still as always with Dostoyevsky, in the depths of forced renunciation he is inviting provincial judges, socializing with landowners and petty government officials, people are carrying his letters to Moscow and Petersburg,  and couriers are turning up miraculously.




2. Meta-Economics


"All Being should be transformed into Having.  Being is one-sided — Having synthetic, liberal."
("Alles Seyn soll in ein Haben verwandelt werden.  Seyn ist einseitigHaben synthetisch, liberal.")
Novalis, Das Allgemeine Brouillon, Nr. 79, Hamburg, 1993, p.15)


Although sacrifice like Being is groundless, the economy of sacrifice is strictly non-ontological.  Being does not have Being.  Can a commodity have a commodity?  Can a risk have a risk?  Being is - whether you like it or not.  It does not have a relationship of having to itself.  Thus, Being cannot sacrifice Being.  No matter how much Being subtracts from Being, it will always end up being Being.  From the point of view of the economy of sacrifice Being is not a great work.


As Being is always Being, its powers of metamorphosis are nil.  Similarly as Being does not have Being, Being cannot 'forget' nor 'remember' Being.  Being is never anywhere else except by or with Being.  Badiou's demand, echoing Heidegger, 'let us forget the forgetting of the forgetting (of Being)' compounds Heidegger's error.  The 'forgetting of the forgetting of the forgetting' is a new chapter in the infinite and immortal history of error.


Errors are exceedingly fertile.  They breed other errors easily.  Errors are hybrids of fiction and fiction, like interest on interest.  And yet, the lifespan of any given error is not infinite - like all matter, organic and inorganic, they too become eventually obsolete. 





    
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Thursday, 26 November 2009

Night Sky Quotes



1.
My Night in the Bad Class

2.
“alles was ist ist zuwenig (…)”
(Everything which is is too little.)
Oswald Wiener

3.
Die Welt ist alles, was der Unfall ist.
A Wittgenstein Victim

4. 
“achtung.
was besteht, ist veraltet.”
(Attention.  What exists, is obsolete.)
Oswald Wiener

5.
How to measure that fraction of measurable to immeasurable?

6.
Why is there action and not just nothing?

7.
“Wenn ich der Regel folge, wähle ich nicht.
Ich folge der Regel blind.”
(When I follow the rule, I do not choose.  I follow the rule blindly.)
Wittgenstein

8.
Open minds are like shared anuses.

9.
Grammar is Theatre

10.
“What is a sadist?”
“Someone who likes to dish out pain.”
(Older youth instructing younger youths on evening rush hour train from Oxford to Didcot Parkway)

11.
If there is no perfect logic, does it mean there is no logic?
If a thing is not perfect, does it mean it is not that thing?

12.
Aesthetic Pain

13.
Everything is allowed as long as it’s insincere.
Confession of Insincerity

14.
The poet is not bad (maudit), language has a certain badness just waiting for the one, who is expected to arrive.

15.
To be true to an event, which ended in defeat, is to be true to a lost cause in its aspect of lostness – it is to be true to lostness, not to Revolution.

16.
For years we resented the false emotions of others, until we realized they were our own and our best possessions.

17.
The gentleman is the real valet.  Only another gentleman can use him with no remainder.

18.
My sensations may be like everybody else’s, but my ataraxy is my own.

19.
Errors are immortal.

20.
“Logik der Empfindung und Fantasie.  / Logik ist schlechtweg Grammatik.”
(Logic of Feeling and Fantasy.  /  Logic is simply grammar.)
Novalis


21.
“Dans le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux.”
(In a really upside down world, truth is a moment of falsehood.)
Guy-Ernest Debord


22.
The stronger the urge, the closer it comes to passion, the more treacherous it was, the higher its content of falsehood, so that we have processed ourselves into that desirable phantom in the centre of all blind instinct, a will full of lies. 
Our Will is the Grand Lie of Being.

23.
Not even madness can cure cowardice.

24.
Your Empire needs you.

25.
“Ich kann ihn suchen, wenn er nicht da ist, aber ihn nicht hängen, wenn er nicht da ist.”
(I can look for him when he is not there, but I cannot hang him, when he is not there.)
Wittgenstein

26.
What does it mean to say that someone is lost, although not physically lost?  Does he know he is lost?  Or to say of someone that he is broken?  What is it, which is lost or broken?  Does he know when he is broken?

27.
There is something of the despot in both the artist and the philosopher.  The work of art or work of philosophy expects absolute obedience.  Each implies the will to absolute power – to completely possess and compel the ‘hypocritical’ Other.