·         Poesis-According to the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, this term can be translated using the English word ‘production[1].’  This word ‘production’ derives from Latin, pro-ducere  “to lead forward, to bring forth, to draw out[2]” and this is the multiple role of the poet that I would like to focus on here;  the poet leads, creates, and selects, these three activities are interrelated. 

 

• In what sense does the poet lead? Adorno, in perhaps his most famous quotation, said, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” let us start from this quotation.  Does Adorno intend for the wells of poesy to run dry after the holocaust? I would say that he does not, that with this quotation he is acknowledging the holocaust as an event that solicits the foundations of culture.  The poet cannot pick up his or her instruments and operate in good faith as if he or she were writing in 1929, or 1829 for that matter, the poet must acknowledge an abyss, a chasm across which communication is difficult if not impossible.  All poetry written now must have this barbarism in its mind, must live with the knowledge of the complicity of language and its entire metaphysical heritage with this event, and the inadequacy of language when faced with it.  What can language possibly say? Who is not reduced to a stammer to a stutter? 

 

• Memory can be quite short.  The poet leads indirectly by choosing to remember.  The poet reduced to silence and tears before this event, the poet unable to respond to this traumatic reality in an adequate fashion,  in what sense can this being lead? In what sense is it possible for the poet this powerless figure to lead? Certainly not in the modernist sense of the poet as re-creator of the world, the romantic sense of the legislator, but rather in a more subtle way.  Now, it may very well be true that due to the nature of poetry poets are more sensitive to human suffering, more concerned to feel for the entire human race, to express the human condition and so on, but they do not do very well in the direct leadership role, like Annunzio taking Fiume. The poet leads, like it or not, but in an oblique way.   The poet leads by dismantling language, as Deleuze and Guattari discuss in their many texts on the minor and major modes of handling language, the poet puts language in variation, drawing it away from the majority language of the state, the stable, rational, traditional usage.   The poet breaks up the “mandatory language” the poet dissociates thought and habitual usage, the metaphysical inheritance of a profoundly unlivable civilization.

 

• What does the poet bring forth and draw out?  I would argue that the poet simultaneously brings forth and draws out.  The poet brings forth a universe, a world, the inherited world,( this holds at least for poets writing in the European and other Majority languages of the world a problem which I regretfully cannot enter into right now) and in the double gesture of his or her writing simultaneously draws out, extracts something that he or she hopes is not in complicity with the genocidal inheritance under which he or she labors.  Each of the words that we use, that constitute us, has a history, and the poet cannot control this, this heritage of language, from the bloody birth of linguistic memory in the human being, to the death camps, this all floods into view upon utterance of the first syllable.  One cannot speak, but one must.  But the poet can play this language against itself, can turn it inside out, can as Deleuze and Guattari say, “make language stutter.”  How is this done?  Language is a sort of bond between sounds/letters and concepts/affects, language is made to stutter when the bond between these is jeopardized, when there is no longer an automaticity to this connection,  when language no longer operates as a seamless code, but begins to burst, the threads begin to loosen, the subject begins to dissociate from the forms that constitute it.  One’s own language is made foreign.    

 

 

 

The question of loyalty is crucial for the philosopher from many angles, one can view it from the ethical angle, from the political angle, from the aesthetic angle, and so on. It is possible to debate the limits of loyalty, to invent theoretically interesting boundary cases to test the obligations that complex sets of loyalties place on individuals. It is also possible to pose this question to philosophy itself, to ask what philosophy owes, to whom or what philosophy is or must be loyal. The first way of asking the question is interesting, but the second seems more profound. The first can perhaps help us solve problems, and help us refine our definitions of terms, but the second touches on the roots of philosophical activity itself, on the questions whose answers determine the ultimate meaning of the first type of questions.

     Much is said about British, German, French, American, Anglophone philosophy. Most of these terms put us face to face with an ambiguity between nation and language; is this German philosophy because it is written in German? because it is written as a German? and so on.  We see something else when we look at the Analytic and Continental labels, we see English and French as two poles with German as a buffer, the English related to German  linguistically, and the French related to it by historical proximity.  What we see in both cases is the decisive influence of German-language thinkers.  In the case of analytic philosophy, many were from places outside of the German nation; in the case of continental, many were from within.  Something similar can be said for the Greeks; their influence on philosophy is universal.  What is it about these two places that one must lay claim to some piece of real-estate in both of them in order to be a philosopher?  Kant and Aristotle, Hegel and Plato, Husserl and Heraclitus, Heidegger and Thales, Frege and Democritus and the list can go on to accommodate nearly any taste. Doesn't any philosophical position need to offer a reading of some part of the histories of one or both of these traditions in order to be philosophy? 

      The obvious answer is no; one can read Chinese, Indian or African thought. One can be a perfect philosopher by studying Indian logic.  However, I would say that this condition applies to anything calling itself western philosophy.   There is also a difficulty with using Greek-derived terms to discuss traditions outside the Greek, or prior to it.  These loyalties one might refer to as the loyalties of reason; the need to work in the realm of pure thought by aligning oneself with some predecessors.  It would be a different world if these were the only loyalties that philosophers had to worry about; in our world, philosophers cannot access these loyalties but through what one might call phronetic loyalties, loyalties of prudence, practical loyalties.  One acquires these through the body; one is raised through the period of ignorance and gradually reduced levels of helplessness that we call childhood, in order to access the lofty realms of philosophical speculation, one must first gain access to them.  It is not simply by gazing on the great vault of the heavens in wonder that one becomes a philosopher. 

      If we take Heidegger as one example, he was educated by virtue of a Catholic scholarship that carried as one of its stipulations that he had to research one of the Catholic saints. This exercised a certain influence over the shape that the philosophical tradition took under his eye.  What sort of phronetic loyalties was Heidegger born into?  What conditioned his discovery of the realm of pure thought?  We can read about all of this in Safranski's biography Heidegger was born in a small German town, and his thought was haunted by scenes characters and forces that derived from that for his entire philosophical career. 

     Today we are not educated in precisely the same way, but we must look on the philosophers and ask ourselves the questions that arise from our insight into the effect that their backgrounds had on their notion of pure thought.  We must ask ourselves: what loyalty does philosophy have to the American state?  What has this creature ever done for philosophy?   If you really want to know, you can check the FBI files of  some of America's most famous philosophers.  One should also ask what sort of respect is paid to philosophers and philosophy as such in American culture? Just look at the high school curricula in this country and see what sort of value is set on philosophy.  In this country philosophy is degraded and ridiculed, mocked by our political class, seen as superfluous and effete, philosophers have to beg for crumbs and are everywhere depicted as pencil necks and socially inept, beings with a pathological overendowment of consciousness who just need therapy. 

    It seems that one is faced with a choice: does one have the courage to be loyal to philosophy?
            

We didn't leave Vietnam because Nixon was a political genius. We left because of the people in the military who did not want to be there anymore. They took matters into their own hands. They had their own anti-war movement.

"There was a big anti-war movement going on by GI's; some who refused to go, some who went and rebelled against their officers while they were there, some who defected to the Viet Cong. I took out any direct references to Vietnam because I wanted it to apply to what's going on now in Iraq." -Boots

These guys are....well listen for yourself.

 The two human hands,
all their tightness of grip, yet
 bound to grasp nothing.

        In many discussions of language, people make a distinction between what we can call levels of existence within language: between langue and parole, between the language system and language use, between competence and performance, between the group and the individual and so on.   Most of these distinctions can be mapped onto an underlying distinction between the clarified lucidity of concepts and the obscure singularity of experience.  According to this perspective, language operates between two poles; between the inscrutable “individual” experiences of language use, and the intelligible and transcendent  system.  

        This image of language, the image of an isolated individual and a larger-than-life symbol system, has certainly had its day.   I find it untenable for a simple reason: the positing of any larger-than-life level of existence as opposed to some other level of existence is not justified.   This type of distinction may be tenable only if it is regarded as regulative, as  a guide for us, and as not a truth.  It is this secondary, this Kantian tenability that is the problem, this image of language even as a regulative idea does more harm than good, and should be rejected, even as an ideal.  

        Just as Kant opened the door again for religion when in his thought he denied knowledge in order to make room for faith, acceptance of the bipolar notion of language as a regulative idea is a resurrection of the forces that advance it as a metaphysical truth.   One of these forces is the state; the language that this perspective makes visible is the unified major language, the dominant national language of administration; the unity of this language is a product of the centralization of the state.  To accept the picture of language based on the figures of the isolated individual and the abstract system as the fundamental reality of language, as the paradigmatic image of language, is to ignore the events that unified that language naturally and historically.  Neither isolated individuals nor concepts caused the birth, expansion or extinction of languages.    

     We can call this approach to language the metaphysical approach.  This is not intended as a reproach against metaphysics.  We name it this way because it tends to study, and to imagine language qua language as an isolable object of study.  As metaphysics for Aristotle was the study of being qua being, these approaches tend to study language qua being.  The equivocation between language as a part of a larger reality, and language as the only reality haunts these theorizations.  This instability of reference is a result of the drive to find all that is significant about language within language itself.  If this is one’s goal, there is no incentive to look toward the other parts of reality, to see language as essentially part of the world; however, there is a strong incentive to see language in an absolute fashion, with no essential bonds to anything else in the world, as pure language.  Pure language is a-political of course, it must be, it is pure.     

      On the contrary, I would posit that language is essentially impure.   Otherly said, this means that language must be studied as though it were essentially a part of something other than itself.   Many advocates of semiotics have misseen this point, language is not the model for semiotics, it is not their essence, on the contrary, the other semiotics in society comprehend language.  The study of language is a subdiscipline of semiotics, among other things.  Language needs to be seen with the other semiotics that are in play, in order to see language as language.  By semiotics I mean both natural semiotics and fabricated semiotics--pheromones and perfume, medicine and logic.    

Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉1644 – 28 November 1694)

Banana leaves hanging

Around my hut-

must be moon viewing

 

Listen! A frog

jumping into the stillness

of an ancient pond!

 

On the dead limb

squats a crow-

autumn night

 

Skylark on moor-

sweet song

of non-attachment

 

Monks, morning-glories

how many under

the pine-tree Law?

 

Four temple gates-

under one moon,

four sects

 

Spring air-

woven moon

and plumb scent

 

The crane's legs

have gotten shorter

in the spring rain

 

Unknown spring-

plum blossom

behind the mirror

 

Morning-glory fading-

all day the gate-

bolt's fastened

 

Summer moons-

clapping hands,

I herald dawn

 

It's not like anything

they compare it to-

the summer moon

 

Early autumn-

rice field, ocean,

one green

 

Not one traveler

braves this road-

autumn night

 

Squalls shake the Basho

tree-all

night my basin echoes rain

 

All through the night

I listened to the autumn wind

in the lonely hills

 

Ah me! What a time

to rain-the night of Harvest Moon.

Oh, fickle northern clime!

 

Sadly, I part from you-

like a clam torn from its shell,

I go, and autumn too.

 

First winter rain-

I plod on,

Traveler, my name

 

Sparrows in eaves,

mice in ceiling-

celestial music

 

Reeling with sake

and cherry blossoms,

a sworded woman in hatori

 

Boozy on blossoms-

dark rice,

white sake

 

Winter solitude-

in a world of one color

the sound of wind

 

A snowy morning-

by myself,

chewing on dried salmon

"For, how could you expect me not to feel uneasy about what that
ancient lawgiver they call the Public will say when it sees me,
after slumbering so many years in the silence of oblivion, coming
out now with all my years upon my back, and with a book as dry as a
rush, devoid of invention, meagre in style, poor in thoughts, wholly
wanting in learning and wisdom, without quotations in the margin or
annotations at the end, after the fashion of other books I see, which,
though all fables and profanity, are so full of maxims from Aristotle,
and Plato, and the whole herd of philosophers, that they fill the
readers with amazement and convince them that the authors are men of
learning, erudition, and eloquence. And then, when they quote the Holy
Scriptures!- anyone would say they are St. Thomases or other doctors
of the Church, observing as they do a decorum so ingenious that in one
sentence they describe a distracted lover and in the next deliver a
devout little sermon that it is a pleasure and a treat to hear and
read. Of all this there will be nothing in my book, for I have nothing
to quote in the margin or to note at the end, and still less do I know
what authors I follow in it, to place them at the beginning, as all
do, under the letters A, B, C, beginning with Aristotle and ending
with Xenophon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis, though one was a slanderer and
the other a painter. Also my book must do without sonnets at the
beginning, at least sonnets whose authors are dukes, marquises,
counts, bishops, ladies, or famous poets.

 

"In short, my friend," I continued, "I am determined that Senor
Don Quixote shall remain buried in the archives of his own La Mancha
until Heaven provide some one to garnish him with all those things
he stands in need of; because I find myself, through my shallowness
and want of learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by
nature shy and careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself
can say without them. Hence the cogitation and abstraction you found
me in, and reason enough, what you have heard from me."
  Hearing this, my friend, giving himself a slap on the forehead and
breaking into a hearty laugh, exclaimed, "Before God, Brother, now
am I disabused of an error in which I have been living all this long
time I have known you, all through which I have taken you to be shrewd
and sensible in all you do; but now I see you are as far from that
as the heaven is from the earth. It is possible that things of so
little moment and so easy to set right can occupy and perplex a ripe
wit like yours, fit to break through and crush far greater
obstacles? By my faith, this comes, not of any want of ability, but of
too much indolence and too little knowledge of life. Do you want to
know if I am telling the truth? Well, then, attend to me, and you will
see how, in the opening and shutting of an eye, I sweep away all
your difficulties, and supply all those deficiencies which you say
check and discourage you from bringing before the world the story of
your famous Don Quixote, the light and mirror of all knight-errantry."
  "Say on," said I, listening to his talk; "how do you propose to make
up for my diffidence, and reduce to order this chaos of perplexity I
am in?"
  To which he made answer, "Your first difficulty about the sonnets,
epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning,
and which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be
removed if you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can
afterwards baptise them, and put any name you like to them,
fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of
Trebizond, who, to my knowledge, were said to have been famous
poets: and even if they were not, and any pedants or bachelors
should attack you and question the fact, never care two maravedis
for that, for even if they prove a lie against you they cannot cut off
the hand you wrote it with.
  "As to references in the margin to the books and authors from whom
you take the aphorisms and sayings you put into your story, it is only
contriving to fit in nicely any sentences or scraps of Latin you may
happen to have by heart, or at any rate that will not give you much
trouble to look up; so as, when you speak of freedom and captivity, to
insert

     Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro;

and then refer in the margin to Horace, or whoever said it; or, if you
allude to the power of death, to come in with-

     Pallida mors Aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas,
         Regumque turres.

If it be friendship and the love God bids us bear to our enemy, go
at once to the Holy Scriptures, which you can do with a very small
amount of research, and quote no less than the words of God himself:
Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros. If you speak of
evil thoughts, turn to the Gospel: De corde exeunt cogitationes malae.
If of the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you
his distich:

     Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos,
         Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris.

With these and such like bits of Latin they will take you for a
grammarian at all events, and that now-a-days is no small honour and
profit.
  "With regard to adding annotations at the end of the book, you may
safely do it in this way. If you mention any giant in your book
contrive that it shall be the giant Goliath, and with this alone,
which will cost you almost nothing, you have a grand note, for you can
put- The giant Golias or Goliath was a Philistine whom the shepherd
David slew by a mighty stone-cast in the Terebinth valley, as is
related in the Book of Kings- in the chapter where you find it
written.
  "Next, to prove yourself a man of erudition in polite literature and
cosmography, manage that the river Tagus shall be named in your story,
and there you are at once with another famous annotation, setting
forth- The river Tagus was so called after a King of Spain: it has its
source in such and such a place and falls into the ocean, kissing
the walls of the famous city of Lisbon, and it is a common belief that
it has golden sands, &c. If you should have anything to do with
robbers, I will give you the story of Cacus, for I have it by heart;
if with loose women, there is the Bishop of Mondonedo, who will give
you the loan of Lamia, Laida, and Flora, any reference to whom will
bring you great credit; if with hard-hearted ones, Ovid will furnish
you with Medea; if with witches or enchantresses, Homer has Calypso,
and Virgil Circe; if with valiant captains, Julius Caesar himself will
lend you himself in his own 'Commentaries,' and Plutarch will give you
a thousand Alexanders. If you should deal with love, with two ounces
you may know of Tuscan you can go to Leon the Hebrew, who will
supply you to your heart's content; or if you should not care to go to
foreign countries you have at home Fonseca's 'Of the Love of God,'
in which is condensed all that you or the most imaginative mind can
want on the subject. In short, all you have to do is to manage to
quote these names, or refer to these stories I have mentioned, and
leave it to me to insert the annotations and quotations, and I swear
by all that's good to fill your margins and use up four sheets at
the end of the book.
  "Now let us come to those references to authors which other books
have, and you want for yours. The remedy for this is very simple:
You have only to look out for some book that quotes them all, from A
to Z as you say yourself, and then insert the very same alphabet in
your book, and though the imposition may be plain to see, because
you have so little need to borrow from them, that is no matter;
there will probably be some simple enough to believe that you have
made use of them all in this plain, artless story of yours. At any
rate, if it answers no other purpose, this long catalogue of authors
will serve to give a surprising look of authority to your book.
Besides, no one will trouble himself to verify whether you have
followed them or whether you have not, being no way concerned in it;
especially as, if I mistake not, this book of yours has no need of any
one of those things you say it wants, for it is, from beginning to
end, an attack upon the books of chivalry, of which Aristotle never
dreamt, nor St. Basil said a word, nor Cicero had any knowledge; nor
do the niceties of truth nor the observations of astrology come within
the range of its fanciful vagaries; nor have geometrical
measurements or refutations of the arguments used in rhetoric anything
to do with it; nor does it mean to preach to anybody, mixing up things
human and divine, a sort of motley in which no Christian understanding
should dress itself. It has only to avail itself of truth to nature in
its composition, and the more perfect the imitation the better the
work will be. And as this piece of yours aims at nothing more than
to destroy the authority and influence which books of chivalry have in
the world and with the public, there is no need for you to go
a-begging for aphorisms from philosophers, precepts from Holy
Scripture, fables from poets, speeches from orators, or miracles
from saints; but merely to take care that your style and diction run
musically, pleasantly, and plainly, with clear, proper, and
well-placed words, setting forth your purpose to the best of your
power, and putting your ideas intelligibly, without confusion or
obscurity. Strive, too, that in reading your story the melancholy
may be moved to laughter, and the merry made merrier still; that the
simple shall not be wearied, that the judicious shall admire the
invention, that the grave shall not despise it, nor the wise fail to
praise it. Finally, keep your aim fixed on the destruction of that
ill-founded edifice of the books of chivalry, hated by some and
praised by many more; for if you succeed in this you will have
achieved no small success"

American society, as it is in a phase of spiteful decline, makes life more difficult for people who do not wish to identify with spite and decadence. Decadence can be defined as the state in which a society or an individual acts against its own health. The effects of decadent financial speculation in the United States are tearing the social fabric apart. We now realize as our infrastructure begins to crumble, as our communities have disappeared, that the market was just as bad as any bureaucrat, probably worse.

What is a philosopher to do with this situation? The philosopher,as a passionate advocate for health and thinking, when exposed to decadence, is obliged to act upon society in some way in order to do away with it. How is this to be done? First, a philosopher can become a political revolutionary, and attempt to abolish decadence by force of arms, in a coup de main.  There is not much more to say about that in this post, but perhaps it can be discussed at another time. 

Another option available to the philosopher is the treatment of decadence as a semiotic pathology.  The overall semiotic system has been poisoned by the idiotic riot of the global market, and philosophy should intervene in the semiotic systems of the world to counteract this.  Philosophers can write books, newspaper articles, give talks, participate in political events and movements; as these are translated and diffused throughout the world's languages and cultures, and more importantly as philosophy becomes a new type of force in world culture, the thoughtless and bestial exertions of decadence can perhaps be overcome. 

This philosopher as physician would diagnose the health of all the semiotics in culture.  All circulations or creations of meaning and value admit the possibility of a semiotic discourse. These circulations include equally the circulation of capital and cash in the economy, the circulation of information and theories in the sciences, the circulation of images and ideas in the arts, and the circulation of technologies and techniques in the crafts.   All of these systems interact in culture, therefore, decadence can cause a major trauma to culture if it manages to create a major disruption in one of the semiotic systems that provide it with ideas about value.   This causes anomie because people are suddenly confronted  with the radical stupidity and decadence of one of the foundations of their environments.  This experience is traumatic, people are unable to comprehend this experience without a total break with their former identity that accepted the now-discredited discourse as valid. 

Above all, it is always the responsibility of the person of thought to remain aware that truth changes.  What we thought was true of the world in 1940, and what we think is true of the world now are very different.  Imagine the difference between 1940b.c. and today.  American society is crumbling, the standing ruins are all around us.  What should we do with them? Rebuild or hasten their fall? 





 

Victory, ah victory, mistress of all the great. Victory, maker and ultimate judge, or so you would be, of history. Victory you grow old and frail, and must be fed on blood and ground bones; the rarefied dust that was once the tooth of human body mixed liberally in its blood are your complexion.
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Immortal Technique

         It seems sensible enough to believe that a person can only write well about those things he or she has some kind of affective relationship with; whether this is conceived as a person, a place, a situation, an event, a piece of something, an animal or a machine.   However, it is equally compelling that we should see rhetoric as a condition of writing; we can see sounds as a condition of speech,  grammar of communication, but we must also acknowledge rhetoric as a structural condition of discursive writing.  

         We have two fundamental conditions of writing or of any public discourse: affect, and rhetoric.  These conditions cover political speech, poetry, philosophy, propaganda and the arts of Mars, as well as seduction and those of Venus.  What we have in these discourses are different configurations, different cultures, different refinements of affect, with affect constantly working by means of rhetoric to cultivate in them certain ways.  In a certain sense,  Rhetoric is affect's means for affecting affect.  There is a rhetoric of cruelty which according to Nietzsche built a memory for the human being.  Memory is forged in this coming together of affect, rhetoric , and cruelty.       

          

      The philosopher is beset on all sides by beings resembling her that she should distinguish herself from.  For instance, we have the priest, the artist, the man of science, the poet, the revolutionary, aesthete, the heretic, the monk, the saint, the historian, the criminal, and the libertine.  Philosophy has crossed paths with these figures many times, but the philosopher remains distinct from them.   How can we  formalize this movement within philosophy enough to have a decent conversation about it? What insights would this yield into the methods of study proper to philosophy?

    
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This guy is an excellent MC, his flow blends together Spanish and English with those horns in the background, and his sense of humour is almost too much to live with without becoming delirious, he re-liquifies language, definitely worth listening to...

 Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881)

 

I. (Call to Arms)

Art 1 – All citizens from 16 to 50 years of age are called upon for the defense of the fatherland and of freedom.

Art 2 – Men between 16-30 tears of age, armed or unarmed, are to report to the Place de l'Hotel de Ville in order to be organized in battalions.

Art 3 – Men between 30- 50 shall remain in their neighborhoods in order to prepare resistance there.

Art 4 – Barricades shall be constructed every 50 meters on all streets. The stones should be removed and on the principal streets the stones should be taken to the upper floors in order to be thrown at the troops of Charles X.

Art 5 – Former military men, officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers are called to the Hotel de Ville in order to form the cadres of the popular battalions.

Art 6 – Commissions will be established for: 1 – provisioning, 2 – armament, 3 – supplying of ammunition. Citizens capable of fulfilling these functions are asked to present themselves to the Hotel de Ville.

Art 7 – Armorers shall deliver firearms, powder and bullets found in their stores to the people. The state will reimburse them for the price of these objects with a 25% bonus for the risks involved.

 

II. From: L'éternité par les Astres:Hypothèse astronomique

The entire universe is composed of stellar systems. In order to create them nature has only one hundred simple bodies at its disposal. Despite the prodigious profit it knows how to make from its resources, and the incalculable number of combinations these allow its fecundity, the result is necessarily a finite number, like that of the elements themselves. And in order to fill the entire expanse nature must infinitely repeat each of its original or generic combinations.

Every star, whatever it might be, thus exists in infinite number in time and space, not only in one of its aspects, but as it is found in every second of its duration, from birth until death. All the beings spread across its surface, big or little, animate or inanimate, share in this privilege of perennity.

The earth is one of these stars. Every human being is thus eternal in every second of its existence. What I write now in a cell in the fort of Taureau I wrote and will write under the same circumstances for all of eternity, on a table, with a pen, wearing clothing. And so for all.

One after another all these earths are submerged in renovatory flames, to be re-born there and to fall into them again, the monotonous flowing of an hourglass that eternally turns and empties itself. It is something new that is always old; something old that is always new.

Those curious about extra-terrestrial life will nevertheless smile at a mathematical conclusion that grants them not only immortality but eternity. The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space. In all conscience, we can hardly ask for more. These doubles are of flesh and blood, or in pants and coats, in crinoline and chignon. These aren’t phantoms: they are the now eternalized.

There is nevertheless a great defect: there is, alas, no progress! No, these are vulgar re-editions, repetitions. As it is with editions of past worlds, so it is with those of future worlds. Only the chapter of bifurcations remains open to hope. Never forget that all we could have been here, we are somewhere else.

Progress here is only for our nephews. They are luckier than us. All the beautiful things that our globe will see our future descendants have already seen, see now, and will always see in the form of doubles who preceded them and who follow them. Children of a better humanity, they have already scoffed at us and mocked us on dead earths, passing there after us. From living earths from which we have disappeared they continue to condemn us; and on earths to be born, they will forever pursue us with their contempt.

Them and us, as well as all the guests of our planet, are born over again as prisoners of the moment and place that destiny assigns us in its series of avatars. Our perennity is an appendix of its perennity. We are but partial phenomena of its resurrections. Men of the 19th Century, the hour of our apparition is forever fixed, and we are returned always the same, at best with the possibility of happy variants. There is nothing much there to satisfy the thirst for what is better. What then is to be done? I haven’t sought my happiness; I have sought after truth. You will find here neither a revelation nor a prophet, but a simple deduction from the spectral analysis and cosmogony of Laplace. These two discoveries make us eternal. Is this a godsend? We should profit from it. Is it a mystification? We should resign ourselves to it.

But isn’t it a consolation to know ourselves to constantly be, on millions of planets, in the company of our beloved, who is today naught but a memory? Is it another, on the other hand, to think that we have tasted and will eternally taste this happiness in the shape of a double, of millions of doubles! Yet this is what we are. For many of the small minded this happiness through substitutes is somewhat lacking in rapture. They would prefer three or four supplementary years of the current edition to all the duplicates of the infinite. In our century of disillusionment and skepticism we are keen at clinging to things.

But deep down this eternity of man through the stars is melancholy, and sadder still this sequestration of brother-worlds through the barrier of space. So many identical populations that pass each other without suspecting their mutual existence! But yes! It has finally been discovered at the end of the 19th Century. But who will believe it?

And in any event, up till now the past represented barbarism to us, and the future signified progress, science, happiness, illusion! This past has seen brilliant civilizations disappear without leaving a trace on all our double-worlds; and they will disappear without leaving anymore of them. On millions of earths the future will see the ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty of our former ages.

At the present time the entire life of our planet, from birth until death, is being detailed day by day with all its crimes and misfortunes on a myriad of brother-stars. What we call progress is imprisoned on every earth, and fades away with it. Always and everywhere in the terrestrial field the same drama, the same décor; on the same limited stage a boisterous humanity, infatuated with its greatness, believing itself to be the universe, and living in its prison as if it were immense spaces, only to soon fall along with the globe that carried — with the greatest disdain — the burden of its pride. The same monotony, the same immobility on foreign stars. The universe repeats itself endlessly and fidgets in place. Eternity infinitely and imperturbably acts out the same performance.

 

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      Wordsworth encountered a revolution, and turned away.  One can see this as a point of rupture in Wordsworth, between the young radical Spinozist, and the later poet laureate.  The later Wordsworth became a figure of good conscience for a generation of repentant rebels, eager to be accepted back into the fold after abandoning revolution in favor of conformity and patriotism.  This makes Wordsworth relevant today, as a poet of the failure of the enlightenment, of the passage from radicalism to conformity, from Marx to Reagan, from the 1960’s to the 1980’s and 90’s.  Wordsworth dramatizes the trauma of a recuperated radical, one who knew what he was fighting for, gave up, and had to learn how to live with himself after that.    

 

In our era exaggerated depictions of evil have become more credible than reality itself. In a different place, it may be the case that exaggerated depictions of good will be more credible, but for 'majority consciousness' in the United States today, as it can be abstracted from media and other public communications, horror has more power than joy. Accounts that attempt go beyond this contest of good and evil, accounts that attempt to blend, integrate, to negate or to transcend good and evil as ways of depicting reality are more necessary than ever. Mankind has been satisfied with accounts in which Evil triumphs over Good, as means of discursive rebellion, rarely have people imagined that something else could displace Good and Evil.

I: The Mirror as Heterotopia

In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.  

--Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces (Heterotopias)