What Was I Thinking? (13 December)

Torpedo the Ark: images from posts published on 

13 December (2014-2023)

 

 

Apart from 2012, 2013, 2019, 2020, and 2022, I have published a post on this date on Torpedo the Ark in every year since its inception. And sometimes, it can be instructive to look back and see what one was thinking and how things may have changed since ...

 

 

Carry On Facesitting (13 Dec 2014) 

This perfectly innocent post is, I discover, another now placed behind a sensitive content warning by the censor-morons who police things for Blogger (which has been owned and hosted by Google since 2003): is it something I said in the text, is it the accompanying image, or is it both? 

 

I don't know. And Google will not say: they simply refer you to their community guidelines and then invite you to identify your own wrongdoing, rectify the situation, and then republish the post in the hope that, after an official review, you'll be allowed to keep it up and that it will be freely accessible to readers. 

For the record: the post is fine as is and I do not intend to make any changes to it. It does not advocate facesitting, although, even if it did, this is not a criminal activity and harms no one.

 

Rather, the post simply reported on a good-natured and somewhat comical protest outside Parliament by sex workers, freedom-loving perverts, and various interested and/or sympathetic parties against new legislation that prohibits the depiction of certain kinky (but nonetheless perfectly legal) acts between consenting adults.

 

It amazed me then and amazes me now, that the UK government might spend its time opposing activities such as facesitting - or regulating the size of dildos - on the (spurious) grounds of health and safety. As one of the organisers of the protest pointed out, the new laws are not only anti-queer, but also inherently sexist, as many of the activities discriminated against are ones that afford specifically female pleasure and empowerment. 

 

 

On the Truth of Things (13 Dec 2015) 

 

Whilst conceding that questions concerning politics and psychagogy are philosophically interesting and that one must invariably return to them at some point, for me, back in 2015 - in my object-oriented days - I was more enthralled by those entities that make up an inhuman and non-human universe and encourage the posing of questions that do not always posit Man as the central subject or final solution.

 

In other words - and I still think this now - the beauty and the truth of things is precisely that they exist mind independently and it's a real joy to occasionally write about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (not to mention bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens), rather than just human ideas and human relations.

 

 

Reflections from a Sickbed (13 Dec 2016) 

 

It strikes me that the depressing thing about a long-term health condition, is that it lowers your expectations of what constitutes a good life; one is suddenly pleased merely to experience a pain-free day.  

On the other hand, convalescence is a vital phenomenon and so sometimes one welcomes being sick, so that one can, as Heidegger would say, return home to oneself and one's destiny - which of course is death (as all being is a being-towards death). 

 

That being the case, it's not surprising that when ill in bed back on December 13th, 2016 my thoughts should turn to the question of how best to dispose of that most accursed of all objects, one's own corpse. After considering several of the main methods, including cremation, inhumation, and immurement, I decided that a Tibetan sky burial - in which one is literally fed to the vultures - was the most attractive option.  

 

 

Kissing Hitler 1: Some Like It Hot / Kissing Hitler 2: Notes on the Führer's Love Life (13 Dec 2017) 

 

Not one, but two posts on the theme of kissing Hitler published on the same day back in 2017 - what was I thinking, indeed! Perhaps there's some truth in Godwin's law after all ...

Although, as a matter of fact, the first post - 'Some Like It Hot' - was more about Tony Curtis (and what it was like to share an on-screen smooch with Marilyn Monroe), than about Hitler as a recipient of amorous affection. 

 

The second post, however, did look somewhat deeper into Hitler's love life - something that has long been subject to critical and clinical analysis, as well as sensational speculation and obscene rumour. I arrived at the conclusion that, ultimately, it was a pity that Hitler wasn't more of a libertine and less of a Nazi; it's always better to make love rather than war, no matter how perversely one may choose to do so.      

 

On Poetry and Plagiarism (With Reference to the Case of Ailey O'Toole) (13 Dec 2018) 

 

The case of the young American poet Ailey O'Toole - which caused a bit of fuss in certain literary circles - still interests me and I still feel that Ms. O'Toole has nothing to apologise for or feel ashamed about and that she was treated poorly by moralists defending bourgeois (and untenable) notions of intellectual property.

 

For the fact remains, very few poets invent neologisms; and even fewer have original thoughts or feelings. They essentially rearrange the words of a shared language and play with the ideas and emotions of the culture to which they belong. It's an art - and it can produce amazing results - but poetry is never a personal or private matter, no matter how idiosyncratic one's writing style. 

 

As Roland Barthes would argue, the poem-as-text is neither representative of a non-linguistic reality, nor expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words that are also drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every poem is, in a sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred. 

 

Wherever she is today - and whatever she's doing - I send Ms. O'Toole kind regards and warm wishes.  

 

 

Notes on the Fetishist (And Other Stories) by Michel Tournier (13 Dec 2020)

 

Michel Tournier was the writer I loved reading most in the winter of 2020-21 and I wrote over twenty posts inspired by (or referencing) his work in this period. 

 

This includes the above post, in which I offered a series of notes on a collection of stories originally published in French under the title Le Coq de Bruyère (1978) and which offered a queer and often disconcerting dip into the world of the sordid supernatural (to borrow the author's own description).  

 

Those who enjoy philosophically-informed fiction that explores the porno-mythic imagination and accelerates what Jonathan Dollimore terms the perverse dynamic, will like this book - and like it a lot. Other readers, who don't enjoy such fiction, probably won't like it so much (but then, such people probably aren't spending time on this blog either). 

 

The Day of the Golden Jackal (13 Dec 2021)

 

I love felines: but I'm not so keen on canids. 

 

That said, I was happy to discover back in December 2021 that the number of golden jackals - small wolf-like animals, about three times the size of a red fox - have been rapidly expanding in number and increasing their range in recent decades. 

 

Apparently, you can now find jackals living, hunting, and howling in many parts of Central and Northeastern Europe and it has been estimated by the IUCN that whilst there may be fewer than 17,000 wolves left in Europe, there are around 117,000 jackals - and the more the merrier, I say, although, of course, all the usual suspects - such as farmers - raise their familiar objections. 

 

Sadly, therefore, these intelligent and sociable animals continue to be hunted in many countries; one can only invoke the great jackal-headed god Anubis to bite off the hands and tear out the throats of those who harm them (some think that capital punishment for deliberate cruelty to animals is a bit extreme, but I'm not one of them). 

 

 

On the Haunting Beauty of Sue Lloyd (13 Dec 2023)

 

Finally, on December 13th last year, I discussed how, as I get older, my desire is increasingly tied to nostalgia and has effectively become a type of spectrophilia; i.e., sexual attraction to ghosts, or, as in my case, the haunting images of dead actresses from the 1960s and '70s. 

 

This includes Sue Lloyd, who guest starred in many much loved English TV shows during this period, but is perhaps best remembered today for her long-running role as as Barbara Hunter (née Brady) in the British soap opera Crossroads.

 

A former dancer and model, Miss Lloyd also appeared in a number of films; performing alongside Michael Caine in The Ipcress File (1965) and Joan Collins in The Stud (1978), for example.  

 

But what I like most about Miss Lloyd is not her acting credentials, but the fact she exuded the kind of dazzling beauty and sexual sophistication of the older woman which excited me as an adolescent and continues to work its magic some 50 years later. 

 

 

Vive le flâneur - et la flâneuse!

 

Mariateresa Aiello: The Flâneur

(Ink on paper, 2011)

sketchbloom.com 

 

"Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. 

The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them." - Walter Benjamin

 

I. 

 

In comparison to the concept of dandyism, which has often been referred to on Torpedo the Ark [1],  the idea of  flânerie - as embodied by the figure of le flâneur - has, rather mysteriously been overlooked.

 

I don't know why that is, particularly as this blog is essentially a form of strolling amongst literary leftovers, philosophical fragments, and the ruins of contemporary culture; coolly observing what passes for (and remains of) the real world whilst collecting images and ideas as I go, thereby making me a kind of postmodern flâneur in all but name.

 

For although the term flâneur threatens to transport us back to the arcades of 19th-century Paris and the musings of Baudelaire and Benjamin [2], that needn't be the case. For the concept of the flâneur - and flânerie as a practice - has been brought into the 21st-century by those who are more interested in moving through virtual spaces and exploiting the opportunities afforded by mobile technologies than actually standing on street corners. 

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, as someone who has concerns with the question of technology, I'm not averse to physically still drifting through Soho; gazing in the windows of shops and restaurants; observing the street life whilst sipping coffee on Old Compton Street; jotting down notes for future blog posts; vaguely hoping someone I know will pass by, or that I might encounter the ghost of Sebastian Horsely; essentially just idling time away (much as I have the last forty years) [3].

 

Paradoxically, as a flâneur one is both an essential part of urban life and yet detached or set apart from it - which kind of suits me as I want to belong, but only on the margins or fringes of society; Johnny Rotten may want to destroy the passer-by, but I'm happy to be a non-participant who is not caught up in events or overcome with enthusiasm (for one thing, this provides a certain degree of immunity from infection by political or religious fanaticism).

 

 

III. 

 

Of course, it isn't easy to be a flâneur in the poetic-philosophical sense today.

 

Some (perhaps overly pessimistic) commentators suggest that the flâneur has been supplanted by the badaud - an open-mouthed bystander who simply gawks without intelligence or aesthetically attuned appreciation for what he sees; one who is enchanted by the Spectacle and is a representative of das Man [4].

 

Way back in 1867, before Debord and Heidegger were even born, the French journalist and author Victor Fournel wrote this:

 

"The flâneur must not be confused with the badaud; a nuance should be observed here. […] The simple flâneur […] is always in full possession of his individuality. By contrast, the individuality of the badaud disappears, absorbed by the outside world, which ravishes him, which moves him to drunkenness and ecstasy. Under the influence of the spectacle that presents itself to him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a man, he is the public, he is the crowd." [5]

 

However, just as I believe in fairies, so too do I believe there are flâneurs still amongst us today; just much rarer in number and harder to spot. And I was reinforced in this by a chance meeting a couple of weeks ago at the National Poetry Library with an astonishing young woman called Tamara who gaily confessed herself to be a flâneuse ... [6]

Notes

 

[1] Click here for several posts on TTA which have mentioned dandyism over the years.  

[2] Developing the work of Charles Baudelaire, who described the flâneur both in his poetry and the seminal essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), Walter Benjamin spurred artistic and theoretical interest in the flâneur as a key figure of the modern world; see The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999). And for a short discussion of this work by Benjamin - and my convoluted relationship with him - see the post dated 21 October 2024: click here. 

 

[3] Readers will doubtless understand that this is a form of active idleness; as one French literary critic noted, flâneurie is tout le contraire de ne rien faire. 

     

[4] The badaud is essentially the anti-flâneur; more bystander than passer-by; the sort of person who today films events on their mobile phone, bartering away the sheer intensity and joy of experience for mere representation. This includes filming those terrible sights from which any decent person would look away; the mangled remains of some poor devil who jumps from the platform in front of a train, for example. 

      In contrast, the flâneur takes single snaps that are technically imperfect and full of flaws, but never obscene or sensational; images that give a fleeting glimpse without exposing objects or making them strike a pose (thereby allowing objects to retain their allure). 

 

[5] Victor Fournel, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris [What One Sees in the Streets of Paris] (1867), p. 263. The (uncredited) English translation is cited on the Wikipedia entry for the subject of badaud: click here.  

      Walter Benjamin essentially adopts this distinction between the two figures of flâneur contra badaud in his work. 

 

[6] The feminine term flâneuse was born of recent feminist lit-crit and gender studies scholarship; previously, the term passante was used to describe the somewhat elusive modern woman who liked to wander round the city, experiencing public spaces in her own manner. Proust famously favoured this term.  

      Readers who are interested, might like to see Lauren Elkin's book: Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (Chatto & Windus, 2016), in which she discusses a number of flâneuses, including George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Agnès Varda, Sophie Calle, and Martha Gellhorn.    

 

Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen

Autumn-Foliage-Strike-Fun

 

 

It's often said that the Greeks have a word for everything, but, as a matter of fact, that's not true [1].

 

Fortunately, however, when the Greeks fail us, the Germans are usually ready and willing to step up to the mark with a compound noun ... [2]

 

Thus, when Maria was unable to supply a term for the pleasure of kicking through autumn leaves - something that I enjoy as much now at sixty as I did at six years of age - I immediately consulted with my friend in Berlin and she was happy to text the following: Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen ... [3]

 

There's something profoundly impressive about the German ability to capture in a single word a relatively complex idea or emotion that would take an English speaker a whole sentence to explain; no wonder Heidegger insisted that German is uniquely qualified for the task of thinking [4] (he wasn't simply trying to piss off certain French intellectuals).    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have even used this idiomatic expression myself on Torpedo the Ark; see the post of 27 September 2020, for example, in which I briefly discuss the 1930 stage play by Zoe Akins from which the phrase derives: click here.

[2] See Ben Schott, Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition (Blue Rider Press, 2013); an amusing dictionary of neologisms that capture the idiosyncrasies of life as only the German language can.  

 

[3] It's pronounced: hairbst-laowb-tritt-fair-gnuu-ghen.   

 

[4] Whilst Heidegger never actually said that if you want to think you have to do so exclusively in German, he did argue that German, like ancient Greek, but unlike Latin - the language of metaphysical philosophy - is particularly suited to thinking because it's phenomenologically well grounded. 

      See Heidegger's famous interview with Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wollf from Der Spiegel (conducted on 23 September, 1966; published posthumously on 31 May, 1976): click here to read the English translation by William J. Richardson under the title 'Only a God Can Save Us'. 

 

 

The Wheel is the First Principle of Evil

 Rota est primum principium mali

 

I.

 

If, like me, you get much of your historical knowledge from the Carry On films, then you could be forgiven for believing that Hengist Pod, an ancient Briton, invented the wheel. However, if like most people you get your information from the internet, then you'll be of the view that it was actually the Sumerians who first came up with the idea sometime in the 4th millennium BCE [1].

 

Either way, I'm not concerned here with the first solid wooden wheels attached to rickety old wagons pulled by oxen, nor even with the wheels used on horse-drawn chariots in Asia Minor, which, thanks to possessing spokes, represented a significant advance and allowed for the production of vehicles that were lighter, faster, and more reliable.   

 

What concerns me, rather - as a thinker troubled by the question concerning technology - is the fact that the wheel is the essential rotating component that allowed for the mechanization of agriculture, the industrial revolution, the becoming-robot of mankind, and the destruction of the natural world. 

 

 

II.

 

In other words, it isn't ithyphallic demons that we have to fear - for even "the double phallus of the devil himself" [2] never truly threatens - but, rather, the spinning wheel wherein mortal danger lies: for the spinning wheel is "the first principle of evil" [3], both within the external world of things and material activity and within the inner workings of the human psyche. 

 

Or, if you want to be a bit Heideggerian about this, you could say that the wheel is that which enframes being; that upon which Dasein is bound and broken and "absolved from kissing and strife" [4].   

 

And those who think the heavens rotate like a wheel are mistaken; the stars and planets may revolve, but they move in their movement, we know not where. Only a fixed wheel, whose centrifugal motion is denied by a stationary axis, spins round and round but never wanders or goes anywhere [5]. 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1]  Of course, it's impossible to know for certain who first invented the wheel because records of such things were not kept in the ancient world. It's more than likely that the wheel was discovered independently by different peoples at different times. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Doors', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 624.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'What then is Evil?', The Poems, Vol. I ... p. 626.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Death is not Evil, Evil is Mechanical', The Poems Vol. I ... p. 627.

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, 'The Wandering Cosmos', The Poems, Vol. I ... p. 627.

 

Note that the above four verses were originally published in the UK in D. H. Lawrence, Last Poems (Martin Secker, 1933).

For a related post to this one on D. H. Lawrence and the poetry of evil (published on 27 May, 2019), click here. 

 

Will Absence Make My Heart Grow Fonder of Byung-Chul Han? (Part 2)

 

Cover of the original German edition (2007) [a]

 

 

I.

According to Byung-Chul Han: "Anti-gravity is the fundamental characteristic of the Western soul, even of Western thinking." [48] 

 

Hegel, for example, is bored by inertia and hates the heaviness of matter: "Anti-gravity is the fundamental trait of Hegel's 'spirit'." [49]

 

And even Zarathustra was opposed to the Spirit of Gravity and wished to see young people become light of foot like dancers and for dancers to become birdlike, so that they may experience the incredible sensation of taking flight [b]. Weighed down by the Spirit of Gravity, they are prevented from ever loving themselves and discovering their own goodness, says Nietzsche. 

 

Of course, this all goes back to Plato who conceived of the human soul as striving towards the divine and infinite: "Its feathered wings allow it to shed its heaviness and float upwards towards the gods [...]" [50]

Far Eastern thinking, by contrast, "is pro-gravitational [...] insofar as it seeks to accomodate itself to the weight of the world" [51], rather than inciting resistance. Keep your feet on the ground seems to be the message.

 

 

II. 

The sea was angry that day my friends ... But that's okay, because maritime adventure is another popular metaphor in Western philosophy: "Conquering stormy seas is seen as a heroic undertaking." [56] 

 

Both Hegel and Nietzsche love to compare thinking to setting out on an endless ocean; for the former - perhaps the most hydrophobic of all philosophers - this requires real courage; for water is the most mendacious of all elements "because it permanently changes its form, because it does not have a form of its own at all" [57] [c] and fails, unlike solid ground, to offer stability (an important aspect of essence):

 

"Western thinking has its source in a desire for solid ground. It is precisely this compulsive desire for permanence and clarity that makes every deviation, every transformation, look like a threat." [58]

 

Kant also relies on a metaphor of seafaring to illustrate his concept of thinking; he trusts in a good captain to navigate with knowledge and to keep the boat clear of dangers: 

 

"The Kantian art of helmsmanship conquers the sea by framing it with a system of principles and fully charting it with coordinates." [58]. 

 

Reason will triumph over the darkness of the oceanic depths, tame the wild waves, and keep the ship off the rocks. Even Heidegger subscribes to this, although he argues for the importance of exposing thought to the abysmal sea.

 

This is not a very Chinese way of thinking: for Chinese philosophers the mind is as great as the sea and in fact they form a unity. Thus, the sea is no threat to man: "Someone who is as big as the world will not be hindered or impeded by anything in the world." [62] 

 

There's no angst in the Chinese model; it's far more carefree and effortless: "You are effortless when you do not set anything against the world, when you fully unite with it." [62] 

 

Thus, as Han concludes: "Chinese thinking involves an altogether different relationship to the world; it is characterized by a deep trust in the world" [63] - and a love of water, in which is seen the highest goodness:

"Because it lacks all solidity, water does not exercise any coercion. It is yielding and flexible. Thus, it does not encounter any resistance. As it does not assert itself, does not resist anything, does not oppose anything, it does not compete in strife." [64] [d]

 

Water, we might say, seduces, although this is not a term that Han uses. He concludes this interesting chapter on land and sea (and ways of thinking) with a convenient summary of what has been discussed:

 

"For the Chinese, the sea is not a symbol of chaos or the abyss, nor is it a mysterious place that lures adventurers. It is neither the sea of Odysseus nor that of Kant and Hegel. It is a place of in-difference, of the unbounded and inexhaustible. In the Far East, the transition from land to sea is not experienced as a transition from a firm ground to an unstable support. It is a transition from the limited to the inexhaustible and comprehensive, from difference to in-difference, from fulless to emptiness, from presencing to absencing, from holding fast to releasement (Gelassenheit). This is true not only of Daoism but also of Zen Buddhism. The moment of satori (illumination) is one of a great transition that leads to an oceanic feeling." [68-69] [e] 

 

Han continues:

 

"For the Chinese, water, or the sea, is the symbol for a thinking or a behaviour that, from moment to moment, adapts and snuggles up to the transforming world [...] The world is not abysmal. It is merely manifold in its manifestations. It is not a being but a path that permanently changes course. Far Eastern thought does not circle around identity. Transformations and change are not felt to be a threat. They just represent the natural course of things, to which one needs to adapt." [69]

 

The Chinese sage does not feel the need to set sail and conquer the world - he's happy just to snuggle up to the latter and be shaped by it ... One is almost tempted to say: Like a woman [f]. 

III.

 

Because we are so caught up in grammar - the metaphysics or presence of God within language - it makes it very hard for a Westerner ever to really think or speak or see the world like someone from the Far East. 

 

Han's native Korean, for example, doesn't presuppose an active subject - in fact the subject is often left out of things altogether, which is problematic for Westerners who find it hard to conceive of a subject-less happening; we have to have an actor behind every action (be it a human actor or a god) [g]. 

 

Han writes: "The subject is a slave who is under the delusion that he is master." [81] What would be noble, from a Buddhist perspective, would be to escape this delusion (and subjectivity) entirely.    

 

Would it be noble also to remain silent? Confucius often wished to remain silent. But Han is at pains to point out that Confucius's silence "does not aim at the unsayable, the mystery that cannot captured by language" [82]. Nor does he want to remain schtum because he thinks language is insufficient "and cannot signify its object adequately" [82]. 

 

In fact, the unsayable - that which escapes language - "is not a theme in Far Eastern thinking" [82] - it's a Western thing: "Language is renounced in favour of a remainder that can be expressed only in song" [82], for example. Or silence is affirmed as the only thing that can do justice to this extralinguistic residue (be it metaphysial, asthetic, or ethical in character). 

 

The silence of Zen masters is an empty silence; it does not refer to anything, but is designed to make others think about the reality of the world, which just is as it is, neither secret nor mysterious; "there are no murky depths" [83] for philosophers or psychoanalysts to uncover or root around in like pigs in search of truffles.   

 

 

IV.

 

The final chapter of Han's book is on greeting and bowing, i.e., forms of friendliness - although, interestingly, he suggests that originally to greet someone "must have involved emitting a dark, gutteral, threatening sound" [90], as, etymologically, the word means to attack, provoke, or unsettle.

 

Somehow, even as a (slightly shy but also somewhat cheeky) three-year old, I already knew this; which is why I was not just being friendly when I stood on my front garden wall and greeted strangers passing by [h].   

 

Han writes:

 

"Initially, the other represents a possible threat and danger to my existence. The other has an usettling effect. The gutteral sound of gruozen is probably an immediate reaction to the primordial threat posed by the other, another human being. By emmitting a gutteral, threatening sound I challenge the other to fight." [91]  

 

Eventually, once there's a degree of mutual recognition, the greeting becomes more of a form of reassurance; it tells the other that they are accepted and that you mean no harm to them. But, crucially, both parties remain separate; a greeting does not instantly or automatically create intimacy; the greeter greets the other across a pathos of distance and from within their own essence. 

 

Offering a friendly greeting lets the other be in their essential otherness - it's not aiming at some form of merger; it says I'm me and you're you. But the Japanese do not verbally greet with a grunt, they bow ...

 

According to Han, bowing is all about absencing oneself from the scene; there's no exchange of gaze or mutual sizing up. In a deep bow, parties form a flat plane between them, levelling out difference. Neither party bows to the other, they bow rather into the empty space between them. Technically speaking, no one is greeting or being greeted; and no one is subjugated or subjugating. 

 

Han writes: "A deep bow does not mediate between persons, does not reconcile anyone with anyone else. Rather, it empties and de-internalizes those involved into absencing individuals." [98]

And that's why bowing is so philosophically important; it's not just a form of politeness, but a way of negating essence and identity [i].

Notes

 

[a] I am using the English translation of this work by Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steur as Absence, (Polity Press, 2023) - all page numbers given in this post refer to this edition.  

 

[b] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'On the Spirit of Gravity'. 

      Readers who are interested might also like to see my post entitled 'On Dance as a Method of Becoming-Bird' (10 Oct 2015): click here.

 

[c] Later, Han will note that whilst water may not have a form of its own, "it is anything but 'amorphous'. It always has a shape, because it takes the form of the other in order to unfold. It is friendly because [...] it snuggles up to any form." [64]

[d] This way of thinking isn't entirely unknown in the West - one thinks, for example, of Henry Miller's insistence on loving everything that flows - but, on the whole, it's undoubtedly true that we in the West prefer things to be dry and solid. Readers who are interested might like to see the post published on 7 June 2013: click here.

[e] Again, this line of thought is not entirely alien to Western thinkers; Zarathustra, for example, tells his followers that in order to be overhuman they must become a sea so as not to be defiled by the polluted rivers of the all too human world, although, admittedly, that's not not quite the same thing as the oceanic feeling of oneness that Far Eastern philosophers champion and Han concludes that Nietzsche - for all his attempted reversal of Western metaphysics - "remained a Western thinker" [70]

      Interestingly, Freud - another great Western thinker - argues that (if it exists) the oceanic feeling is a primitive form of egoism preserved from infancy.     

[f] I'll let readers decide whether that's a  good or bad thing, but would remind those in need of reminding that even Nietzsche toyed with the supposition that truth might be a woman; see the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. If that's the case, then that pretty much changes everything; no phallogocentic certainty; no solid foundations or fixed forms, etc. (Again, I'll let readers decide whether this would be for better or for worse.) 

[g] Han notes: "For Asian aesthetic sensibility, something that happens without a subject being involved, without the imprint of a doing, is both noble and beautiful. The imprint of a subjective act is a typically Western motif." [84] 

      Nietzsche, of course, attempted to think deeds without an actor, but, says Han, he was unable to "turn from the philosophy of doing and power to the philosophy of happening" [85], which is why he remained very much a Western thinker and "more or less attached to subjectivity" [85].

      As for Heidegger, whilst he "may have repeatedly allowed himself to be touched by Far Eastern thinking" [88], he also remained in many respects a Western thinker attached to the idea of essence. And if he frequently used the trope of the way, his way "differs from the way as dao" [88]. Ultimately, Heidegger's being is a bit more mysterious and withdrawn than the being-so of Eastern thinking, which is what we might call everyday immanence.   

[h] See the post entitled 'Say Hello Then!' (3 Aug 2018): click here.

 

[i] I'm pretty sure Roland Barthes recognised this in L'Empire des Signes (1970), though I'm not sure Larry David fully appreciated this in episode 7 of season 8 of Curb Your Enthusiasm (2011). See the post entitled 'Shit Bow: Larry David and Roland Barthes on the Art of Japanese Etiquette' (26 Oct 2017): click here. 

 

 

To read part 1 of this post, please click here. 

Notes on 'The Crisis of Narration' by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2)

(Matthes and Seitz Berlin 2023) [a]

 

 

I.

 

Byung-Chul Han really likes Walter Benjamin - not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

He makes over a dozen references to Benjamin's work in the opening chapter of his new book and more than another dozen or so references to texts by this quirky cultural theorist in chapter two, which is where I'm picking up this commentary-cum-critical encounter ...

 

In 'The Poverty of Experience' Han - following Benjamin - mourns the fact that communicable experience passed down orally from generation to generation is "becoming increasingly rare" [10]; nothing is narrated any longer; no one tells stories drawn from their own lives any more.    

 

Folk wisdom no longer counts for much when people freed from tradition by technology look to Google for answers and download problem-solving apps: "The new barbarians celebrate the poverty of experience as a moment of emancipation." [11] 

 

And, to be fair, perhaps modernity did provide an opportunity to start from scratch and make it new ... 

 

Benjamin's thought is shot through with ambivalence on this question; as a Marxist, he believes in progress and the revolutionary spirit. But, in the end, his "deep-seated scepticism towards modernity" [13] wins out and he decides that we are ultimately impoverished (and dehumanised) by the disenchanted world of today - and not even Mickey Mouse can save us. 

And for us, in a late-modern (or post-modern) era, not only do we exist without history, but even the future has come and gone. No one even tries to make things new or dares to dream of radical social transformation; no one has "the courage to create a world-changing narrative" [14] and storytelling is now mostly "a matter of commercialism and consumption" [14]. 

 

This is quite a bleak analysis: "It is only with narrative that a future opens up, for narrative gives us hope." [15] But as a Nietzschean philosopher, I can happily do without the morally optimistic idea of hope. Indeed, let me remind readers of my new year's message for 2024:

 

Hope may be one of the great Christian virtues, but in Norse mythology it is simply the drool dripping from the jaws of the Fenris Wolf; and courage is a term for the bravery displayed by the warrior in the absence of hope [b]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Is the past something that needs salvaging - or something in need of salvation? It's an interesting question (assuming the past doesn't just need forgetting). 

 

Han - again following Benjamin - plumps for the latter: "We owe our happiness to the salvation of the past." [16] 

 

I have to say, that's not the kind of sentence I'd write. For it is just as true that we owe an awful lot of misery to the fact that people often can't (or won't) let go of the past and that far from saving the past they ruin the present and sacrifice the future with something else that "has a long tail and reaches back into the past" [16] - ressentiment and the will to revenge. 

 

Nietzsche says that the greater the plastic power of a people, the more history they can embrace and affirm as their own. But he also ties innocence to forgetfulness and insists that whilst it is Christian to forgive, it is noble to forget. So I'm not entirely convinced that we need to resurrect the past and make it a continuing influence upon the present.     

 

Having said that, I do enjoy a certain level of temporal (and personal) continuity; I like to imagine I'm pretty much the same now as I was aged six, for example. And one of the things that's nice about the theory of evolution (or, I suppose, the myth of creation in Genesis) is that it allows one to feel part of a much wider and longer story (though I'm not greatly concerned about this). 

 

 

III. 

 

When it comes to certain things - selfies, social media, and the art of Jeff Koons, for example - Han is very much like a dog with a bone; i.e., unwilling to let go and determined to get to the marrow (or essence) of the thing. 

 

Thus, no surprise to see him taking a pop at Snapchat and Instagram once more and declaring that digital photos are - if not quite the soul-stealing work of the devil - things that "announce the end of the human being as someone with a fate and a history" [20] and mark the birth of Phono sapiens - non-beings who have surrendered to the momentary actualities of experience and are unable to discriminate or be selective. 

Phono sapiens believe they are being playful on their smartphones 24/7 and that this puts them in control, but, actually, they are being manipulated and exploited. 

 

 

IV.

 

Ultimately, Han comes to the same conclusion as the protagonist of Sartre's Nausea (1938): "Only with narration is life elevated above its sheer facticity, above its nakedness." [27]

 

In other words, narrating make's the world and time's passing meaningful; it inhibits that feeling of nausea that Roquentin experiences. But, arguably, la nausée is just a Sartrean synonym for (or another aspect of) what Heidegger terms angst  - and surely the key thing about angst is that it's not something to be overcome or resolved. 

 

Narrating the world may make meaningful and be comforting - may make objects seem less alien and less threatening; may make the fact that being rests upon non-being seem less troubling - but this also insulates us from a fundamental form of freedom.      

 

Ultimately, I think I'd rather be dizzy before the void and bewildered by the (sometimes malevolent) presence of objects than fobbed off with some transcendent narrative, even if that makes the world rhythmically structured and promises blissful order. 

 

By insisting that existentialism is a humanism, Sartre transforms "frightening being-in-the-world into familiar being-at-home" [29] and such domesticity is not something philosophers should be advocating.      

    

V.

 

The thought has just occured to me: I'm Konrad - the boy who cannot tell stories [c]. 

 

For just like Konrad, I lack the inwardness that would allow me to "internalize events and to weave and condense them into a story" [34] and my world, like Konrad's, is pretty much entirely disenchanted. 

 

Perhaps that explains why my dreams of becoming a novelist came to nothing - and why I like fragments and pieces of factual information so much. 

 

But please don't send me to see Ms Leishure ... 

 

For whilst I agree that, utimately, the world is made up of events that resist explanation and that we might question causality, I don't wish to become "a member of the small narrative community" [36] if that means abandoning reason or denying the possibility of objective facts. 

 

If things have a magical aura that's great: but even things that don't possess that radiance which raises them above mere facticity, they're still astonishing and it seems to me that a scientific description of the unfolding of the universe is just as beautiful as a mytho-religious narrative such as the one found in Genesis.     

 

And finally, as readers will know, I hate full-stops and prefer to use an ellipsis whenever possible ... 

 

And that's because, in my view, there's always something left unsaid and even the most perfect of narratives can never really be sealed off in an intertextual universe; can never be a concluding form that has closure as its goal and can't wait to stamp the words The End, thereby passing a kind of death sentence. 

 

There is no end - and there is no origin; we should instinctively mistrust any book or story that opens with the words In the beginning ...       

 

 

Notes

 

[a] This is the cover of the original German edition. I am relying upon the English translation by Daniel Steuer published as The Crisis of Narration (Polity Press, 2024). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.  

[b] See the post 'Nothing Changes on New Year's Day' (31 Dec 2023): click here. See also the much earlier but related post 'Happy to be Hopeless this Christmas' (26 Dec 2014): click here.

 

[c] Konrad is a character in a short story by the children's author Paul Maar. Han discusses this story in chapter five of The Crisis of Narration. 

 

 

Part 1 of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

Part 3 of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

 

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part Three)

Cover of the Portuguese edition 

(Relógio D'Água, 2022) [a]

 

 

I.

The ethics of inactivity rests, according to Byung-Chul Han, on timidity. For it is timidity which increases our attentiveness (our ability to listen) to others and to the world. 

 

I'm not sure about this, however, and wonder if the German word Scheu might better have been translated as shy. For shyness, it seems to me, is not quite the same as timidity; it lacks the nervousness or fearful aspect of the latter and is more about instinctive reserve [b].

 

But maybe I'm mistaken: I'll leave it to any passing etymologists to decide the matter ...  

 

 

II.

 

"The root of the current crisis is the disintegration of everything that gives life meaning and orientation. Life is no longer borne by anything that supports it, and that we can support." [48]

 

In other words - words first uttered by a madman 150 years ago - God is dead. One might have hoped that we'd moved on from here and realised that nihilism needn't be dressed in the gloomy dark colours of the late 19th-century. Personally, the last thing I want to do is give life meaning and point it in the right direction. 

 

Nor am I interested in ideas of immortality and the imperishable - when Han uses these words I think of D. H. Lawrence mocking those who desire to witness the unfading flowers of heaven [c]. 

 

I'm sorry, but I like the impermanence of things and the fact that all things pass. What Han calls temporal structures - annual rituals and festivals - may provide the passage of time with a certain architecture or narrative, but they don't, thankfully, make time stand still. I'm all for preserving the rhythym of life and allowing being to linger, but that doesn't mean stopping the clocks.    

 

Nor do I want incontrovertible truths - even if they are said to make happy (there's more to life than happiness and there's also more than one type of happiness). And I'm sick of being weighed down by powerful symbols. 

 

The latter may very well influence our behaviour and thinking "at the pre-reflexive, emotional, aesthetic level" [50] - and symbols may be excellent at creating the shared experience that enables the formation of a socially cohesive community - but that doesn't always result in compassion, does it? Just ask those who lived under the swastika, or hammer and sickle.      

 

"A community is a symbolically mediated totality." [51] That's Han. But it could be Heidegger. Or might be Hitler. And if my failure to long for a "wholesome, healing totality" [51] makes me a splinter or fragment lacking in being, that's fine. Liberal society has many downsides - it isolates the individual and forces them to compete - but living in some kind of people's community that promises fullness of being and salvation is not something I desire.  

 

Although, having said that, I do understand the attraction of what Lawrence terms a democracy of touch [d] and I suspect that's the sort of community Han is thinking of when he talks about creating ties between people invested with libidinal energy (though I'm not sure that Eros is the answer to everything).  

 

 

III.

 

Having got roughly half way into (and thus also half way out of) Han's book, let us remind ourselves of his central argument: "the highest happiness is owed to contemplation" [53] - not action. It's an argument we can trace all the way back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. 

 

Ultimately, we act in the world so that we might one day be afforded the time to sit and wonder at the world. Being free to gaze in silence and stillness is the reward for all our efforts. If, as Heidegger says, Denken ist Danken, then to gaze in awe with eyes opened by love is also to express gratitude - and, more, to give praise:   

 

"The ultimate purpose of language is praise. Praise gives language a festive radiance. Praise restores being; it sings about and invokes the fullness of being." [55]  

 

To which we can only add: Hallelujah! - and quickly turn the page ...

 

What Han basically wants is to have at least one day of holy inactivity per week: to reinstate the idea of the Sabbath in which time is suspended and man is released "from the transient world into the world to come" [60]. 

 

I've no objection to that (even if I remember keenly the boredom I felt as a child each and every Sunday). But I do tire of his religious language (as I do when listening to Jordan Peterson, for example).

 

 

IV.

 

Han spends a good deal of time in the chapter entitled 'The Pathos of Action' critiquing Hannah Arendt's political thinking. But that wasn't what interested me. Rather, it was the material on Socrates and his daimon that caught my attention ...

 

It seems that the latter does not encourage Socrates to speak, rather it prevents him from acting, as he makes clear in this passage from the Apology:

   

"Perhaps it may seem strange that I go about and interfere in other people's affairs [...] but do not venture to come before your assembly and advise the state. But the reason for this [...] is that something divine and spiritual comes to me [...] a sort of voice [...] and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward." [e]

 

This strikes a chord with me because I also have a daimon of non-commitment holding me back in this manner; one who persuades me to turn away from every door that is opened and decline to accept any opportunity offered. People think it's perversity on my part - or a lack of self-confidence combined with a lack of ambition - but it's not; it's this mysterious demon which Han terms the genius of inactivity.  

 

According to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben - quoted here by Han - this demon is both what is closest to us and what is most impersonal about us; that which is beyond ego and individual consciousness; that which shatters the conceit that we are fully in control and free-willing; that which "'prevents us from enclosing ourselves within a substantial identity'" [79][f].  

 

Han follows this up with the following fascinating passage:

 

"The properties that make us someone are not genialis; that is, they do not accord with the genius. We meet with the genius when we cast off our properties, the mask we wear on the acting stage. The genius reveals the propertyless face that lies behind the mask." [79]

 

This countenance without properties is what we might also call the faceless face; or perhaps even (borrowing a term from Deleuze and Guattari) the probe-head [g]. To be inspired, says Han, is to lose face and cease being someone "encapsulated in an ego" [79]; i.e., to be enthused is to become self-detached. 

 

However, as Larry David teaches, it's vital to curb enthusiasm. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, caution is the golden rule when dismantling the face and/or building a body without organs; "you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality" [h].

 

This, arguably, is the most important - and most often overlooked - point in A Thousand Plateaus.  

 

V.

 

The crisis of religion, says Han, is a crisis of attention: "It is the soul's hyperactivity that accounts for the demise of religious experience" [86-87] - and, indeed, the destruction of the natural world. 

 

I don't agree with Han that a Romantic [i] and religious understanding of the world is necessary, but it might help to just slow down a bit and appreciate not just one another, not just birds, beasts and flowers, but even inanimate objects (each one of which vibrates and radiates at the centre of its own paradise). 

 

This doesn't mean uniting with the infinity of nature, it means rather living cheerfully in the material realm on a flat ontological surface, or what Lawrence calls (after Whitman) the Open Road. The goal is not a community of the living, but a democracy of objects wherein all things can interact in a vaguely friendly manner but outside of any transcendent system of meaning.   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Although this is the cover of the Portuguese edition - featuring some of Cézanne's nude bathers - please note that page numbers given in this post refer to the English translation of Byung-Chul Han's work by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024), entitled Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity.

 

[b] I have written in praise of shyness in a post published on 27 May 2014: click here.

 

[c] Referring to the kingdom of heaven established after the material universe is destroyed, Lawrence writes: "How beastly their new Jerusalem, where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness. How terribly bourgeois to have unfading flowers!" 

      See D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 144.

 

[d] See Stephen Alexander, 'Towards a Democracy of Touch', chapter 13 of Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 262-275, wherein I examine and develop Lawrence's idea introduced in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). There are also several posts published on Torpedo the Ark that discuss the idea: click here for example.

 

[e] Plato Apology, trans. Harold North Fowler, (The Loeb Classical Library / Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 115. Han quotes this section (31 c-d) from a different edition; Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, (Hackett Publishing Co., 1997).

 

[f] Han is quoting Giorgio Agamben writing in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort, (Zone Books, 2007), p. 12. 

 

[g] According to Deleuze and Guattari, beyond the face "lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of probe-heads [...]"

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 190.

 

[h] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 160.

 

[i] Han seems to see himself as a disciple of Novalis, the 18th-century German poet, novelist, philosopher, and mystic. He certainly subscribes to a similar model of Romanticism, writing, for example, that the Romantic idea of freedom is a corrective to our liberal-bourgeois notion of individual freedom, just as the Romantic conception of nature "provides an effective corrective to our instrumental understanding of nature" [92]. 

      He also argues that to Romanticise the world is to give it back "its magic, its mystery, even its dignity" [94] and that it is a mistake to describe "the Romantic longing for a connection with the whole" [96] as reactionary or regressive. It is, rather, a fundamental human longing. Obviously, I don't share Han's Romantic idealism or fervour and don't think I want to live in a promiscuous future world in which things don't only touch but permeate each other and there are no boundaries.     

 

 

To read part one of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here. 

 

To read part two of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa, click here. 

 

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part Two)

Cover of the original German edition

(Ullstein Verlag, 2022) [a]

 

 

I.

 

One of the key paragraphs in the opening chapter of Vita Contemplativa is this one:

 

"The dialectic of inactivity transforms inactivity into a threshold, a zone of indeterminacy that enables us to create something that was not there before. Without this threshold, the same keeps repeating itself." [17]  

 

In other words, the threshold of inactivity engineers difference and produces the new. For example, only silence enables us to say something previously unspoken and unheard of [b]. Madonna's insistence that we all express ourselves may be accompanied by a funky upbeat dance track, but the message is inherently fascist, ensuring conformity and sameness [c]. 

 

Jamie Reid was right: pop music keeps young people under control [d] and pop stars like Madonna are merely the "sexual organs of capital, the means of its procreation" [20].

 

Or, as Byung-Chul Han writes: "The compulsion to be active [...] turns out to be an efficient means of rule. If revolution is inconceivable today, that may be because we do not have time to think." [18] 

 

Perhaps if young people listened to less music and read more poetry, they'd be able to liberate "the immanence of life from the transcendence that alienates life from itself" [21]. Whether this results in bliss is debatable, but, who knows, it might at least rescue them from the abyss of the virtual and the hell of the same.  

  

II.

 

I have written several posts on Torpedo the Ark that refer to Cézanne's work - click here and/or here, for example - but I've never come across the notion that his canvases construct a landscape of inactivity in which things are wedded to one another until now.  

 

It's a nice idea. Or, at any rate, I like the idea of things falling in love and entering into "frank relations with one another" [24]; of tables and trees and bowls of fruit all interacting in a friendly manner whilst shining in their own singularity; "liberated from human intentions and actions" [24]. 

 

Cézanne's landscape of inactivity: "cuts ties with humanized nature, and restores an order of things that is not anthropomorphic, in which things can be themselves again" [24-25]. His apples, for example, are not merely fit for consumption, as D. H. Lawrence recognised [e]. 

 

This is at the heart of Cézanne's greatness; the fact that he allowed objects to "have their own dignity, their own radiance" [25] and didn't put himself into every picture. Indeed, he knew that a painting only succeeds when the artist makes himself absent.

 

 

III.   

 

Because he essentially comes out of the German Romantic tradition, it's no surprise to see that Han loves nature and posits the "reconciliation between humans and nature" as the "final purpose of a politics of inactivity" [26].   

 

He coninues: 

 

"The Anthropocene is the result of the total submission of nature to human action. Nature loses all independence and dignity. It is reduced to a part of, an appendix to, human history. The lawfulness of nature is subjected to human wilfulness and to the unpredictability of human action." [31] 

 

What can be done? 

 

Heidegger famously concluded that only a god can save us [f]. But for Han what is needed is an angel of inactivity to "arrest the human action that inevitably becomes apocalyptic" [33]. It's reflection that will lead us back from the edge of catastrophe and to that dwelling place where we have our being (on the earth and beneath the sky).  

 

Reflection - and learning to wait: "'Waiting is a capacity that transcends all power to act. One who finds his way into the ability to wait surpasses all achieving and its accomplishments'" [35][g] - which, arguably, is simply a Heideggerian version of the English proverb: Good things come to those who wait.

 

Han seems perfectly okay with this delving into folk wisdom, but I have to admit it troubles me; what next - should we write in praise of common sense and popular opinion ...? I do like reading Heidegger. And I do like reading Byung-Chul Han. But you have to be in a certain mood to do so ...

 

 

IV.

 

Funny enough, Han speaks about mood in Vita Contemplativa ... Being-in-a-mood, he says, precedes the being of consciousness and allows being-there to find expression. But mood is not something of our choosing or at our disposal: "It takes hold of us [...] we are thrown into it" [36].

 

And that's a good thing, as it reveals that our being-in-the-world is determined less by activity than by primordial ontological passivity. Actions are never thus "entirely free or spontaneous" [36]. And even thinking, says Han (following Heidegger), is grounded in mood. 

 

Thus, AI doesn't really think because it isn't capable of extracting thoughts out of mood: "Contemplative inactivity [...] is alien to the machine" [37], even when you switch it off. For the machine, to think is simply to produce data - it's certainly not about expressing gratitude.  

 

 

V.  

 

To return to the question of how to save the natural world, clearly we need a radically transformed relationship with the latter and this requires thinking through. That doesn't mean not doing anything, but it does mean questioning the will to activity that has brought us to where we are today:

 

"There can be no doubt that the determination to act is necessary in order to rectify the catastrophic consequences of human intervention in nature. But if the cause of the impending disaster is the view that what is absolutely fundamental is human action - action that has ruthlessly appropriated ad exploited nature - then we require a corrective to human action itself. We must therefore increase the proportion of action that is contemplative, that is, ensure that action is enriched by reflection." [ 40-41]   

 

It also means learning to breathe again ... for the compulsion "to be active, to produce and to perform. leads to breathlessness" [41]. That's certainly true. I've been slowly suffocating for the last eight years and very much hope that taking time to reflect a bit more carefully will, in future, allow me to finally catch my breath ...

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Although this is the cover of the original German edition, please note that page numbers given in this post refer to the English translation of Byung-Chul Han's work by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024), entitled Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity.  

[b] This is an idea found in the work of Deleuze, which Han acknowledges by quoting the following passage: 

      "So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying." 

      See Gilles Deleuze, 'Mediators', in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 129. 

[c] I have written about this song by Madonna and the socially corrosive effects of insistent self-expression in a post dated 6 August 2023: click here.

[d] The artist Jamie Reid is best known for his work with the Sex Pistols. His Stratoswasticaster design was intended to alert people to the oppressive nature of the music industry. Click here to view on artnet.

[e] See Lawrence's essay 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182- 217. 

      For Lawrence: "Cézanne's apples are a real attempt to let the apple exist in its own separate entity, without transfusing it with personal emotion [...] It seems a small thing to do: yet it is the first real sign that man has made for thousands of years that he is willing to admit that matter actually exists." [201]

[f] This phrase - which, in the original German reads Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten - comes from an interview given by Martin Heidegger to Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff for Der Spiegel magazine in September 1966, but not published until after his death in May 1976. 

      The interview touched on many aspects of Heidegger's thinking, including the relationship between philosophy, politics, and culture. It was translated into English by William J. Richardson and published in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. 

 

[g] Han is quoting Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis, (Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 147. Heidegger goes on to say: "In waiting, the human-being becomes gathered in attentiveness to that in which he belongs." Something I try to remind myself of when at the bus stop. 

 

 

Part one of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part three of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be read by clicking here.