All Picks posted by Marcus Steinweg
To detach oneself from one’s narcissism means to subscribe to an indeterminacy which evades control.
What if democracy existed only as an opening to the dimension of its negation? What if democracy had to open itself to a negativity (or positivity), to a danger and a threat, to an absolute alienness and incommensurability in order to constitute and assert itself as democracy, as [more]
Section 42 of Being and Time cites the 220th fable of a certain Hyginus, as Martin Heidegger says, “by way of pre-ontological evidence for the existential-ontological interpretation of Dasein as care”: ”Once upon a time, when ‘Care’ was crossing a river, she came upon some clay-loam. Reflectively she took up [more]
The philosophy of modernity since Descartes, since the Enlightenment, since Kant has been put into question as such a practice of violence insofar as the concept and the demeanour of construction (for instance, of systems) and of erection (of a transcendental subject) are invariably combined with the authority [more]
The withdrawal of the human being has already begun. The subject in human being is accelerating on the line of departure from the human being. It draws the trace of an exertion which tries to turn the world and the self upside down by giving way to an [more]
If undecidability is a part of decision, as Jacques Derrida has shown, then this means for the subject of decision that it is a subject in the space of undecidability and also the subject of undecidability. The question concerning this subject and its relation to other subjects would [more]
The first sentence of the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason from 1781 sketches the outlines of problematic subjectivity. “Human reason has a particular fate in one genus of its knowledge: that it is troubled by questions which it cannot dismiss because they are posed [more]
J’habite une douleur Le poème pulvérisé (1945-1947) Ne laisse pas le soin de gouverner ton coeur à ces tendresses parentes de l’automne auquel elles empruntent sa placide allure et son affable agonie. L’oeil est précoce à se plisser. La souffrance connaît peu de mots. Préfère te coucher sans [more]
The “tragedy” of love, its failure does not describe its course in the sense in which one says that a relationship has ended ‘tragically’ or ‘has failed’. It is the origin of the movement of love as a movement of mutual distancing from the self. The subjects of [more]
Because the subject does not have any transcendental or religious, that is, substantial determination, it cannot miss its destination.
In his Leibniz lectures in the summer semester of 1928, Metaphysical Principles of Logic, Martin Heidegger touches on the “question of ethics”. Fundamental ontology as developed in Being and Time is not the whole of metaphysics. It has to be supplemented by a metontology. Only the unity of fundamental ontology (which [more]
It is obvious that there cannot be any beginning before the beginning. So what is before it? And what name do we want to give to it? Philosophy is nothing other than this temptation of the nameless. Philosophical desire circles around a void which would be misrecognized if [more]
For Foucault, Nietzsche is the philosopher who has broken with the modern concept of philosophy, with philosophy as a movement of totalization with a universal claim. Since Nietzsche, thinking is satisfied with establishing the particular. It is itself perspectival instead of assuring itself of its origin and its [more]
Melancholy presents the subject with an account for its subjectivity. The subject has to pay for what cannot be paid for. What cannot be paid for is the name for the subject’s initial encounter with loss. For there is something resembling a subject only as the subject of [more]
The clash of two blindnesses, of opaque pre-reflective matter with the opaque self of a subject without subjectivity, marks the scene of birth or beginning of another, non-Cartesian subject that unites the darkness of its origin with the veiling of its horizon, a singular subject that is equally [more]
1. Because Foucault is the thinker of the subject of a certain self-derangement. The subject leaves its traditional position. It becomes the subject of a movement of decentralization. The subject is the subject of a powerful self-marginalization. It is the subject of self-exceeding. It goes through the experience [more]
Theodor W. Adorno: “Relativism, no matter how progressive its bearing, has at all times been linked with moments of reaction, beginning with the sophists’ availability to the more powerful interests”.
“I was a child, seven or eight years old, I was in an isolated house, near the closed window, I looked outside — and at once, nothing could be more sudden, it was as though the sky opened, opened infinitely toward the infinite, inviting me with this overwhelming [more]
1. Because in every moment of her writing Duras circles the “origin” of the origin. 2. Because this circling is related to an unrelated emptiness. 3. Because circling around the empty origin is touching truth. 4. Because to touch a truth means to relate to the namelessness of [more]
Antigone is this raving dreamer, who tries to protect herself against the symbolic imperatives and the temptations of the imaginary in order to develop a self-assured demand which is a kind of law of all the lawless, the ‘law’ of those who come into conflict with the law, [more]
What is the highest ethical ideal according to Nietzsche? That human beings free themselves from the spirit of revenge. Freedom begins where the will to revenge and punishment turns into the will to responsibility, i.e. to freedom. To want to revenge oneself means to want to be unfree [more]
Every real artwork verges on the realm of nonexistence. Nothing divine emerges from it, no infinite depth, but the fragility and the precariousness of reality itself. No beyond—nothing transcendent appears in the apparition of nonexistence. By including nonexistence into existence itself, the nonexistence of positive transcendence reveals itself [more]
Perhaps every engagement with the work of Maurice Blanchot, who is both a writer (doubtless in a new sense established by him himself) as well as a philosopher and political thinker, has to be an engagement with the undecidability between politics and ontology. How can the relationship between [more]
The onto-political concept of the refusal introduced by Maurice Blanchot is anything other than reactive. It is aggressive. It corresponds to the law, not of unity, of consensus and of satisfaction, but of a “necessary division and an infinite destruction”. In it an echo of Walter Benjamin’s destructive [more]
Gilles Deleuze: „Moi, je veux sortir de la philosophie par la philosophie.“
How to back out of the alternative of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the possible and the impossible? How to think an opening that opens toward something not-given—toward the nothing itself—; how to affirm this opening toward closure without depriving it of its characteristic openness? How to [more]
The lacanien real is the name for that which does not belong to the space of facts. The real names the border and the constitutive exterior of the factual dimension. The real is more real than reality. It is what inscribes a fundamental inconsistency into „realistic“ calculation, the [more]
The world of facts is a sphere which by definition excludes truth in order to enable social, political, cultural, that is, identifiable reality. Realities or factual truths are truths that are not truths. The space of facts is constituted through the pathological exclusion of truths because truth is [more]
There is no active consumption. In the objectivity of the consumer, the subject becomes controllable. It is disciplined, calmed down, tranquillized and put out of action. The subject of capitalism as this receiver-subject is a subject reduced and restricted to its capacity to consume. It does not decide [more]
Jacques Derrida: “A just, appropriate decision is always necessary immediately, at once, right away. It cannot first go about getting hold of infinite amounts of information, the limitless knowledge of the conditions, the rules, the hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. Even if it had such a knowledge, [more]
Philosophy, insofar as it represents the event of a culture of logos that has lasted more then two and a half millennia, associated itself from the outset with light (with the platonic sun, the Christian lumen, the Aufklärung, the enlightenment, the Lumières, the Husserlian evidence and the Heideggerian [more]
Deconstruction expends itself as the desire for a faceless future which includes also the desire for a new responsibility and justice; it falls over itself in the expectation of that which no expectation accommodates. It exists only as this somersault, as an ebullient movement into the unknown, as [more]
To speak of a subject, no matter whether it be to deconstruct its modern form and its traditional predicates (self-consciousness, freedom, independence, autonomy, etc.) by demonstrating its transcendental derangement, or whether it be to confront it with the ineluctable obligation to judgement, resoluteness and its rational grounding, demands [more]
Persistent at the heart of reality is an element that is explicit to it.
A truth which does not need to correspond to given criteria can only be a lawless truth. Blind or headless truth to which a child spiralling out of control commits. A truth founded not on any knowledge, which therefore remains unproven and unjustified. That’s what we call evidence: [more]
Could Antigone’s evidence lie in this non-idealistic conception of freedom: in a claim of freedom, which runs through all the stages of objective non-freedom? There is the appeal for a certain kind of resistance and freedom connected to Antigone. Antigone barricades herself from the established order, in order [more]
One cannot sacrifice one’s life to the unliveable without being a lofty idiot. The philosophical perspective into which the antigonistic subject puts itself is not transcendence. It’s neither about higher values nor about a divine law superior to a human one. It’s not even about a childish heroism, [more]
Antigone’s desire is desire for autonomy, embedded into the heteronomous, an autonomy from this world, if you will, one turned towards the heteronomous as the mundane nomos. Something like self-determination can only exist with a window towards heteronomy, in the here and now of codified reality. Freedom is [more]
One cannot help but to compromise oneself. One is already compromised. No subject is ever intact (or, as Adorno puts it: „None is tabula rasa.“ There is no integrity untouched by the facts. The incommensurable measure of freedom, which Antigone allows herself despite Creon, articulates itself only in [more]
As headless as this crazy child may be: Antigone is aware of her own precision. Consistently she overhears Ismene’s voice, representing the general doxa. What speaks through Ismene is established reason. Ismene knows nothing but caution, contemplation, comparison. Antigone, however, verges on the delusion of the subject. Her [more]
Freedom exists solely in the self-extensions toward non-freedom. The same holds true for critique: it can only operate on affirmative grounds, not from a safe outside or a distance that imagines the schöne Seele of the constituted realities, but in factually being contaminated by the subject of its [more]
Because Jacques Derrida “parallels the critical moment of deconstruction […] with an affirmative” (Christoph Menke), he defines deconstruction as “deconstruction of critical dogmatism” (J.D.). That is, it’s an activity open toward the affirmation of the event or the unforeseeable, the incommensurable, which is why he can say “that [more]
What distinguishes the love of truth from the belief in truth is that the subject of the love of truth (the philosophizing subject) does not presuppose truth as substantially given. Only in touching truth does truth constitute itself. Truth means nothing other than the untouchable, the beyond of [more]
„The romantic“, Georges Poulet writes, „is a human being discovering him or herself as the center”–just like the narcissistic subject. Falling back on the narcissistic imaginary has a stabilizing function. It bridges the abyss of non-sense by filling it with meaning. The narcissist lives his life trying to [more]
The oversized terms of the metaphysical tradition (justice, truth, freedom, etc.) are markers of inconsistency because what they denote does not have a 1:1 representation in the field of constituted facts, since by definition it represents the threshold of the spectrum of representation and therefore destabilizes it. The [more]
The subject’s entanglement with reality indicates its being-in-the-world. Reality is another name for world, with world meaning two things here: firstly, the hyperbolic totality of what is (German Seiendes, as opposed to Sein, lit. being) in its ontological indifference; secondly, the homogeneity of the universe of facts as [more]
To philosophize is to love in an exaggerated, restless and excessive way by fleeing from the ghosts of unfreedom into reality for the sake of freedom. Philosophy does not flee reality. It flees into the heart of reality.
The first object of critical inquiry is its own conditionality: the impossibility of the unconditional; that is, the impossibility of undisguised freedom or authenticity. When Adorno, in his book on Husserl, insists that “the real life process of society is […] the core of the contents of logic [more]
At no point is philosophy a flight from reality. On the contrary, philosophy can be a movement of flight but what it flees is not reality. Philosophy flees the ghosts and phantasms that step in front of the appearance of the real. It flees the consolations, illusions, mere [more]
The transcending of its conditions is the precondition for art. The transgressive transcending of these conditions is affirmative because it holds itself open to the beyond of realities as possibilities. An opening that tears the subject from its embrace with reality.
When Adorno writes, “in the midst of art, the social thorn grows back,” he says that the opening toward the socio-biopolitical sphere of facts belongs to art, whether art wants it or not. Art cannot succeed in locking itself into an l’art pour l’art aestheticism or immanentism. But [more]
We must, says Wittgenstein, rely on our forms of life and language games, we must accept them like the ground on which we tread. Yet this does not mean that we had a reason to leave ourselves a last ground, a final certainty, because each life form and [more]
Ludwig Wittgenstein speaks of the embeddedness of the subject in a language game, meaning that the affirmation of a frame of reference or system precedes even the utmost skepticism, critique, and doubt: “All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And [more]
We expect art to be critical: critical of institutions, society, art itself. Simultaneously, there is no art that exhausts itself in critique. Even the most critical art has affirmative traits. How can we think the possible coexistence of critique and affirmation? What, actually, is critique and what does [more]
Philosophy is the triumph of the impossible over the possible. Therefore it has a bad reputation (of being out of touch with the world, unrealistic, ‘abstract’, over people’s heads, etc.) because it refuses to calm down in the present and instead to put it into question and in [more]
Jean-Luc Nancy: Collectivity means collected people : that is, people taken together from anywhere to the nowhere of the collectivity or of the collection. The co- of collective is not the same as that of communism. This is not only a matter of etymology (munire versus ligare) . This [more]
Maurice Blanchot describes the experience of emptiness as a “feeling of happiness” that assails the subject as a “ravaging joy”. Joy of an opening that opens toward its closure, so infinite is this emptiness that contains not the least positivity. An emptiness that closes the space of the [more]