Monday, November 14, 2011

We were all poets...

We were all poets back in those days,
we would ooze out from the cracks of life and merge on the way.

We were all poets,
our poems would live by leaning over each other without any other ground.
Nobody would ask a question like "what is expressed by the poet here?"
We all knew that the expressed was always another poem, resisting to explanation.

We were all poets,
we would become polluted while leaking from the cracks of life.
We would flow into each other's poem, blurred.

We were all poets,
we would look to each other with loaded eyes.
And we loved each other through the pouring poems of our eyes,
we would make love to the extent of our thick and blurry and dirty waters mingled...

We were all poets as much as we were embodied poems,
we would touch one another while becoming some other image every time.
Each time, with our image-becoming that comes from pre-historic times and goes to infinity,
that travels across the whole of time,
that fills the space between us with a time that never was,
we were acquainted with each other as ourselves during the encounters of our intensities.

We were all poets back in those days.
Time, embarassed of our existence, would bend to our presence.
We,
we would look at it with serenity through our violent image-becomings.
So would time give up its being history,
it would let itself free in every move of its peculiar dance and it would talk about its before.
In its every curve, there was always a franticness.
In every franticness, there always was an infinity.
The deepness of being would talk to us from within this infinity.
The deepness of being narrated the savage character of our image-becomings as if we were always there, we were there eternally...

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Enigma and projections of life

What is an enigma? Is it a riddle that just waits there to be solved? Not at all. If it were so, everything would have been much easier (and boring) and probably human beings would have been somewhat uniform. An enigma is that which does not have a solution. It is not a question waiting to be answered. It seems to me to be the pure form of question which does not have and do not need an answer. But it is a very special form as if it is the form itself and in-itself.

It is even almost impossible to call enigma an 'enigma'! It is never there to be signified and it is everywhere so that you cannot point at it. I don't yet know why I keep coming to the same metaphor in almost every subject but I cannot help it to think of enigma as the atmosphere. It is very mind blowing to me to think about the atmosphere. You cannot feel its existence but it is always there. It is everywhere so that you are always already in it without even thinking that you are in it. Enigma seems to me to be a psycho-sociological atmosphere, maybe we can even say that it is 'the will of a time'. 'The' and 'a' are the most important features of this adjunct. The tendency of a time, here time being not 'the' time but a singular time. Not at all an individual time where psychology is in act. It is singular, not particular. It is shared only by way of its singularity. Maybe enigma is the moods of Greek gods, never understood consciously but followed willingly. You can never judge a god by its doings. They will to do so and they do so. And the people who are under the influence of gods - oh, those great people - they cannot be judged also. Like Helen who ran away with Paris... She was not accused to be immoral when she returned back because she betrayed her husband and went together with handsome Paris. No. She was just obeying the goddess, Aphrodite. She was in her mood and it was a good thing to be in a mood. This was the projection of what a life should be and how it should be lived at that time and that location. There was nothing to be understood, but only moods to go along with.

Anyway, if we return to our subject and try to understand 'the will of a time' in terms of 'the' and 'a', and of course in connection with a pure question of how to live and form in-itself, there still remains too much to grasp. It is the enigma itself that contains everything.

Before beginning to write, I was thinking about how is it possible to have a projection about life. For example what is it that makes somebody go like this: I will finish my school, I will find a job that pays well, I will be independent for a while, then I will find a person whose status is in accordance with mine, I will marry and have kids, I will live in the security of my status and my marriage even though I don't even like the person I marry after a while... when I try to complete this projection what is deepdown there in the fundaments is: I will live forever. I even asked a girl who had such a projection for her life "but what about death?" She looked at me as if I was talking in a language that she does not know a word. That was the atmosphere she was breathing in, without any kind of dying. Or maybe it was too banale of me to point out such a fact. Maybe it was the most natural thing. I don't know shit. All I know is that this very concept of projection is an enigma for me. It is this 'how' I find very troubling. But it is again this 'how' most of the people live their lives without being shocked at every moment of what they do.

So there are things, enigmas that nobody talks about or teaches to their kids but everybody knows, and the kids even more so are aware of this projection because they see there are things adults do and does not make sense. And because their memory of taking this air into their lungs is very fresh. Because they remember the pain. That is why they have a very sharp version of this projection. A horrible one. It is like a jungle out there in the kindergarden...

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Words are more

One: words are never just words. They are more than their meaning in their material beings. They embody some kind of rhythm and this is more worthy of attention than the meaning they supposedly transmit.

The experience of talking with the people of different cultures made me realize a very important fact about how I communicate and in general, what I like in communicating with others. Actually, it is no more communicating (if what we think of communicating is transmitting messages across) than it is, well, having fun. This fun consists of chance, experiment, coincidence and repetition as I see it. How?

First of all, you never start your sentence knowing what you are going to say next. It is not planned. To start talking, it is enough to just point out something around. This may be a thing, a person, a view, but most of the time it is a situation that covers a number of these elements and others. A complex situation that stands out just by pointing at it. This could be the beginning and the end of conversation. This is the chance factor. Some pointed situations just cannot bear to hold a whole conversation on them. Of course what I am describing here is a conversation between ideal, in other words understanding partners. Well, I happen to have a friend with whom I communicate in this way, so I am lucky. But the structure is more or less the same for a whole cultural assemblage and this assemblage is very different from that of European ones as far as I have seen.

So there is a situation and it's been pointed out. There is no message intended in this pointing out. It is just like a gesture which says "look!" And this, having no message at all, will be a recurring theme in the whole process of communication. You are there, not as "you" but as a part of the situation. If the situation is complex enough, it generates other different branches of itself that you can comfortably be placed in, without knowing. This is important. There is absolutely no knowledge, nothing is consciously grasped. Actually if someone brings conscious activities in the conversation (a German friend of mine used to do this constantly), the whole process dies. It stops to carry you on. "And...it's gone."

You have the situation, then situation holds you in. You don't have any mood killers around and you start regenerating the situation from within. Now, this is the experimential part and it should also be coincidential so that it holds the communication together. One experiment breaks down while the other proves itself solid. The solid one is solid as much as it has elasticity. It having elasticity means that it has a lot of virtual lines that could be taken up. You go ahead from these virtual lines, both of you simultaneously. This is where co-incidence occur.

After the success of all this previous process, repetition of what is experimented in the situation and what coincidentally occured comes to play. And it is the best part. This gives you joy as well as an eagerness to continue on experimenting. Every repetition is new and there is always more than words in what is repeated. The rhythm of life.

What I realized is that other cultures (most of European cultures) do not communicate as we do. They really have something to say beforehand and they want their message to get across. I even felt bad for a while thinking that I never knew what communication is to that day. But then I met Italians and their "eternal dadaism" felt so good, so freakishly full of life, I promised myself never to suspect if I am doing this right or wrong again. Afterall, there is nothing to suspect if you feel good right?

I won't ever have any message to give except "let's play!"

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Philosophy, location and confusion

There is a deep problem about philosophizing in a time in which globalization of the world is a common belief. It is not really an error because of the mobility of everything, first and foremost money of course. Besides, messages from all over the world are a click away. All these create an illusion that we, as human beings, have more or less the same problems no matter where we are. Well, one could not be more in error than this.

What I observed on philosophy students in Turkey is that they take philosophy as something ultimately abstract, so much so that it cannot have anything to do with life itself as we experience it. Of course we can say that most of them just don't get it just like the philosophy students all over the world. Philosophy requires a different way of thinking and most of the people find it useless. In Turkey we even have a saying which implies the uselessness of philosophy: we say "don't philosophize to me" whenever somebody is talking just to talk without any meaning whatsoever. It is just ignored. Yes, I will admit that this is not a local but a global approach to philosophy. And there is the opposite approach which is very common too. I don't know about the world but in Turkey if philosophizing is not ignored, that means you are in a setting where everyone thinks that they can philosophize too. Oh this is the worst, because they make philosophy an aggregate of cliches and by repeating cliches, the phrases such as "the meaning of life is to be happy" or "we cannot know what tomorrow will bring" they really think that they are thinking. But what I had in mind was to make a different point from inside, the strange position of the professionals.

Basicly, I think that we have different problems in this part of the world and the main problems of philosophy in the 20th century such as subject-object issues do not fit anywhere in our world. We never experienced what is to be cogito. The loneliness and the instrumentalization of the world within that loneliness never happened here. Our existence (from a cultural perspective) never suffered of being separated from the world. These are the first points that comes to my mind right now. But I don't mean that we are not there yet or that we are behind of western history in some way and that we are going to experience the same problems when we are developed enough(!). No, not at all! What I mean is things go differently in this specific location with its specific ways of dealing with the world. A little shamanism, a little nomadism, a pinch of "loving every creature because of its creator", understanding rules and regulations by their gaps and what could be done with them without getting into trouble, not being serious about anything, etc. These are a few constituents of our existence that I can think of right now. So telling someone that she is not really a subject does not have an effect other than confusion. There goes philosophy into the deep waters of abstraction. I even had a professor who said philosophy is confusion. Of course it is and remains confusion if it is not connected to its grounds. These grounds are the problems. So philosophizing in different environments require to be aware of the environment and formulate the unspoken problems of that specific location encompassing people, location, climate, language, social attitudes, food, entertainment, etc. And here the academics are talking about the death of subject or the unveiling of truth in poetry!

I don't intend to say that these subjects shouldn't be a part of philosophy in this specific location. But since I believe that philosophy should be something that feeds itself from life and life should be enrichened by philosophy, the main issues of western philosophy not only stay at a distance to life here, but also contribute to confusion about concepts which constitutes my main point.

For philosophy to be an invention of new possibilities, it is crucial to make all the concepts as clear as possible. Only after understanding the concept within the concept will we be able to invent ours. So there it goes: our problems are different than that of any people living in a different geography. Our main problem is confusion about concepts and not specific concepts, but concept of concept itself. Only after we made concept clear and invent our own concepts for various aspects of our experience, we can start to philosophize. At the moment, there is a disgusting manipulation of the confusion arising from this vagueness. And I just hate to see how beautiful concepts are used in every ugly way possible. Here it becomes a very important political issue. Philosophy could open a way out of this political and social problem. If only the academics themselves were not blind to people's confusion... sometimes it is even as if they feed on this confusion, like leeches. So where to find their genuine concern for philosophy? I don't think they have a genuine concern for anything other than surviving. So why philosophy? They could have been involved in real estate as well and as a matter of fact, they would be doing a favor to all by not worsening the already deep confusion.

Monday, July 11, 2011

In praise of being noble and dancing

What does being noble mean? It seems to me that being noble is a non-calculative attitude. It doesn't mean acting without consideration of the consequences, nevertheless very similar to that. It is acting while being aware of the consequences but refusing to change the action because what results of it. It is a conscious resistance to be determined by the consequences.

Well, most of the time this kind of attitude is a result of defending identity. But I think being a result of defending a fixed definition of "me" makes it a vulgar act rather than noble. It says "I am afraid of what is going to happen to me". It says "I have to resist in order to survive". It is too self-conscious to be noble.

To be noble, you have to consciously forget about everything that falls out of the action itself. The consequences are among those that fall out. The cause on the other hand is a little tricky. The cause of the action should be such a cause that would not involve any calculation whatsoever other than something that could not be called calculation: that is aesthetic evaluation. This is an evaluation of the action itself, in itself and by itself. In other and simpler words, it is going with the world without resisting but like a talented dancer, figuring out every move you make together with the world at every moment. There are no predetermined rules when it comes to life. So, being noble is the awareness of this indeterminedness and enjoying it. It is being light in the face of heaviness of consequential thinking or what might be called "the soul of gravity". It is dancing just to dance. Because it is the right thing to do, it feels good.

But what are the chances of such an attitude in a world in which everything is considered to be calculated even though it is not at all so? How could a good dancer enjoy dancing with the people who are so far removed of the concept of dance? Of course she could still dance with the world, the events by herself. But while everyone around repeat their memorized, one-way electro moves (so depressively dull), is it possible to dance alone freely? Does not a dancer need a few other dancers and a good music to dance?

To be noble necessitates a few other things it seems. First of all, it is impossible to be noble for a long time in an environment in which not considering the consequences is thought to be a dumb thing to do. This is where action itself loses all its power when it is tied to a simple lack of consideration. So the event cannot regenerate and multiply itself. This is a dead end. Just like the repetitive moves of (bad) electronic music.

Secondly, thinking of being noble as a way to resist and defend identity is in cross purposes with being noble itself while the aim is lightness as opposed to heaviness. All that calculation is a heavy burden to carry around just to survive a little bit more. Could crawling be called a life while there is a possibility of flying?

Friday, June 17, 2011

Sense of Life in Sense and Life

One of my favorite words in English is "to germinate." I could have said germination but it would not be the same. I like words which are in the form of verbs. Infinitives. What a beautiful name for verbs! They move, they make something happen when they hang on in the atmosphere. It is as though they are really infinite. An endless becoming...

Anyway... Today, after a chance encounter with the etymology of the word "fool" (which was also very interesting) I wondered what would be the word I would like to learn about while the page of an online etymology dictionary was still open in the screen. "To germinate!" I said to myself with enthusiasm. The dictionary first refered to "germination" (which I find a little dull), then from that page we smoothly passed to "germ" which was given as the root of all.

Here is the definition and the history of "germ":

germ (n.)
mid-15c., "bud, sprout;" 1640s, "rudiment of a new organism in an existing one," from M.Fr. germe "germ (of egg); bud, seed, fruit; offering," from L. germen (gen. germinis) "sprout, bud," perhaps from PIE base *gen- "to beget, bear" (see genus). The older sense is preserved in wheat germ and germ of an idea;[...]

Then something else comes into play: "sense of "seed of a disease" first recorded 1803; that of "harmful microorganism" dates from 1871. Germ warfare recorded from 1920."

How different is the definition of "rudiment of a new organism in an existing one" from "seed of a disease", or "harmful microorganism." Of course it could be said that this change in the sense of the word "germ" is parallel to the germ theory of disease which was validated in the late 19th century. But still I have a hard time to follow this kind of causal thinking. It is very dry and therefore it does not seem to be the real explanation of what happened. Furthermore, what I am inclined to believe is the almost opposite of this inference: I think the sense of "germ" has already been changed, it had already began to reside in the "bad" side, otherwise it would be impossible to name a bad, sickening thing with a word which carries life, which is "good." So life itself must have become a burden at some point. Then somebody was able to find "germs" as causes of disease.

How did we come to understand "new life" as a bad thing? Is it because new life does not ask our permission to sprout? Are we offended by life and its ways to invent itself? Why are we so afraid?

Another thing worth thinking in a different way, without resorting to causal explanations that reduce our sense of the world, thus us, to something which has no effect at all. It is like breathing and not even noticing the air you breath in eventhough you cannot live a second without it (well, it may be a little longer for some of us). We have to understand our making-sense-of-the-world right to be able to change it, or to get a breath of fresh air...

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Be fair and go fragile!

What is erotic is most of the time something that takes you outside of yourself. Out of your normal perceptions, that is if you have any (normally you do have a normal perception, they say so, but I wouldn't know). Suddenly you get the feeling as if you cannot hold yourself together. Dissolving. Melting on a surface which is not even a surface. It is something you have in mind, something you feel in the atmosphere, something sharp, something thight, something you catch around the corner of your eye, a fleeting glimpse... It is very fragile.
Nevertheless we live on it. We live just for the possibility of these fragile moments. But what I don't understand is that why are we so eager to get rid of fragility. Why are we trying to normalize, to stabilize everything? Why can't we be happy with...just dissolving? Why is the endless torture to find "yourself" again? To get yourself together. They even have a saying for this: to get yourself together... What the fuck is that!? Get yourself together for what, and how, and why? And why not stay dissolved, live the fragility of everthing? Because this is the hardest way to live. Erotic life, that should be it, living the fragility of everything. Being interested in everyting as every little thing asks for. As much as they ask for. Being fair, that's it...

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Encounters and germinating ideas

I've always had some ideas about the world, how things are. But maybe they shouldn't be called ideas, they were rather seeds of ideas, not fully understood by me in the first place. Nevertheless,I was operating on them.

There is this weird thing. Every passing day, every time I learn something (real learning is changing) I find my little seeds germinating as if they were waiting me to see the sunlight. I had to go this direction, to read that book for them to grow, to make themselves apparent. Every time my thinking changes by some beautiful concept or argument, it finds itself in the depth of my mind.

My little seeds were for example:
If I loved somebody, they would love me back. Unrequited love was impossible. Because it was impossible to stand in the way of real affirmation. Love was the affirmation of difference. Not uniting but being multiple. Now I read Nietzsche more deeply than I've did too immaturely when I was 14, I come to understand why I was thinking such a thing. Because only real affirmation returns. Don't think that I was somehow effected by Nietzsche's books, unconsciously. No, this idea was there before I met him, even before every possible memory.
Isn't this magical!

The other idea was about reality. What is real and what is not? This question really didn't concern me. For me the dreams I've had or the books I've read which effected me was as real as the concrete reality (I still don't know what they call as concrete reality). When people interrogated me about the reality of some story I've told, my answer was always "does it matter?". I couldn't really understand how its reality (realy happened in the concrete) would have an effect on its beauty.

For example there was this story in a book about Hegel. The philosopher Hegel had a professor friend. This friend encountered a butcher in a village in one of his travels. The butcher had the exact same name as the philosopher Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. And better, this Hegel was writing for the monthly butcher magazine about butchering, how it should be and stuff. It is already funny... So the professor friend, eager to amuse himself with a joke, told Hegel the butcher that he was writing so beautifully, that he impressed him with his talent, that he could become a philosopher and took him to the university where the real (!) Hegel was. Hegel (he is Hegel afterall) had a few years of philosophy courses and finally graduated and started to teach there. But all was too much for him that finally he had a nervous breakdown in one of the lectures he gave. After that it becomes a little sad. Hegel could never recover.

Anyway, there is something there that amuses me, but I don't know what. Maybe it is the fact that Hegel couldn't take too much Hegel himself. Or maybe it is the fact that Hegel made it to the university in the first place because he was made believe by the professor friend that he was talented. Believing to the admiration of people more than yourself could be really harmful.

I tell this story to people sometimes, I tell it in an effort to understand what amuses me there. Maybe their perspective would give me a clue to understand what is going on in this story, what was I effected by. But of course most of them cannot go that far. They become stuck from the beginning. They usually ask "did this really happened?" What is the difference, really? I am asking because I don't know what difference would it make if it really happened or not. I never asked myself this question. For me it was as real as the person who is asking me if it was real, and maybe even more so because the story effected my thinking more than this little mind in front of me asking stupid questions.

Now I read Bergson more deeply, I understand that this kind of questioning reality doesn't make sense. The significance of things are not, could not and definitely should not measured by the concrete. Real "what is real" question is actually about significance. Beautiful!

So how can I have these seeds of ideas if I don't know them? Why I am operating on them rather than taking the already known ideas, the rational ones? And how does it happen these encounters with Nietzsche, Bergson and more? The encounters that would make the seeds grow, bring them forth, make them intelligible. How do I go towards them?

And why on the earth people resist so much? How are they content to share the generally known ideas? Because if I have such seeds, they must have some too. Do they have different seeds which, by chance, happens to be the same in everyone? Am I one of the few who has such things in her mind? No. That would be ridiculous. But what is more ridiculous is that how all this happens. How they close themselves to themselves, running away instead of following the traces of their own ideas. How to follow the traces, that, I don't know, but it seems that I am doing it. Weirdly so.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Blocking the way instead of blocks of sensation

What if we were to take Merleau-Ponty as a creative writer rather than a philosopher? Would we be able to analyse his texts in line of Bergson-Deleuze line of affective intuition? I think yes, of course...

Intuition is a method originally developped by Bergson. It means that we are able to connect with (if we make an effort, be attentive enough)what we normally, in the spacial time dimension, don't see. What we don't see, according to Bergson, is the world in the state of becoming, an image movement, in the form of an already passed away and not yet happened.

If we put aside all the philosophical evidence against it (including the arguments he himself made), I think Merleau-Ponty was already seeing that, or more appropriately, intuiting that. As if he was an artist trapped in a philosophers mind, he was putting forth his intuition that forced limits of sense for him, right after this going forward, he was using his own philosophical device to get back on the line of thought that blocked the way through which his intuition wants to go. This must be the reason for the difficulty of reading him, although I don't see any but academics say so. They are having difficulty to make sense of him because of this intuition / reason intertwining. And they are happy to be limited to the arguments he made in the formal way, discarding his intuitive movements. Can it get more dry than this?

And what would have happened if, from the beginning, he was identified not as a philosopher but an artist? Would he be still discarded as hard to read and ambigious? Don't think so. He would be praised I believe, as being a creative artist.

More important question: since he would not have the philosophical device that made him stumble and retreat, blocking the way which his intuition directs him to, would he be a better artist than the philosopher he was? Well, this is a hard and speculative question, but I will go with "yes"...

Thursday, April 28, 2011

For a subject outside of dichotomy Part 1

Parodi: "I would be tempted to say that the body is much more essential for sensation than it is for perception."
Merleau-Ponty: "Can they be distinguished?"

In this beautiful answer lies the whole essence of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. The philosophical assumption that leads to separate understandings of sensation and perception is that there is a subject and an object. It is commonly assumed that in perception, subject is the one who acts towards the passive object. There is an act of subject and it happens outside. In sensation, there is an internal state of affairs of the one who has been stimulated by something. These two conceptualizations complete each other in the same plane of dichotomy of subject and object. What Merleau-Ponty says brilliantly, is that perception happens both outside and inside. More correctly, the distinction of outside and inside, which refers to two different orders of being, happens to be a false distinction that originates from the doubt of senses. For what is seen is simply not true just because it does not cover all the perspectives that it can be seen and it does not correspond to the thing itself properly. For example, I only see the front of a house if I am standing in front of it and another pair of eyes which are situated at the backyard of the house would see the back of the house. So what enables me to think that what we both see is the same house? It sure looks different. For Merleau-Ponty, the assurance in me that me and my friend are seeing the same house and if I move to the backyard I would see what he is seeing now, is the assurance of perception being of this world. The house would assure the perception of itself by simply being there. In other words, different perceptions of things could not be a reason to doubt perception's adequateness in regard to reality, if we do not will for a reality that is absolute, timeless and unchangeable. On the contrary it would be an evidence to trust the perceptions, because they are the possibilities of things themselves. The possibilities of the world we live in. The character of reality which is in time. The subject-object dichotomy of which the distinction between perception and sensation originates, is based on the will of something fixed, eternal, unchangeable. So it creates these two different orders: one of which is in action reaching out of its cage called body. The other is the one which is being acted on, the body that the acting figure eludes in order to know, to organize, to classify the bodies just like it. How these two orders relate to each other in the first place, is an enigma. And what is it like to have such a view of reality which is so different from perceived world that does not have anything to do with one's own experience?

This will of two different orders of subject and object, is doing injustice to the inexhaustible character of reality as well as inexhaustible possibilities of experience. And more importantly it seems to me that maintaining subject-object distinction in such a way, is working at cross purposes with the salvation of subject herself. For placed on this insufficiently objective as well as insufficiently subjective plane, subject could only be a shadow of what she could become. If we want to save the subject and not a dummy of her, we must first give her the freedom to live in the world and the means to trust her perceptions as if they are the perceptions of the world perceiving itself. Only a moving together with the world could open up the possibility for the subject to create her own style, thus her subjectivity.

Final words from the man himself:

"By these words, the “primacy of perception,” we mean that the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us; that perception is a nascent Logos; that it teaches us, outside all dogmatism, the true conditions of objectivity itself; that it summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of being present at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality. This experience of rationality is lost when we take it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary, rediscovered when it is made to appear against the background of nonhuman nature." (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

Thursday, April 21, 2011

I am the truth! Irresistible and unbearable...

Ok, I know that was too much promising for everybody. Give it to my old journalism carrier. I like punch lines. That was all journalism had to offer for creativity anyway. So...
I think that I have the right as everybody to say that I am the truth in person..

What brought my thinking to this point could seem pretty unrelated and weird at first. That is unbearable lightness of being...Is it really light when it is unbearable? Well it is and that is the whole point. Let me tell you something which is one of the reasons I like languages: in Turkish the book was translated as "dayanılmaz" and that means unbearable and irresistible at the same time. It just depends where you use it, in what context. But still, that gives another point of view to Kundera. Irresistible is actually unbearable. The guy there just goes to one irresistible to the other. What life offers is irresistible as the moment itself... just because it forces itself on you. It says something else and you are the idiot that never gets it. Like the famous example of "now here" and "no where". If you could get it you would become it. There is no distance actually, we are inbetween, touching everything and that is the thing we have to understand.

Let's listen some Badiou, here we need him:

"The subject is woven out of a truth, he is what exists of truth in limited fragments."

Yes! Continue...

"A subject is what a truth transits, or this finite point through which, in its infinite being, truth itself passes or transits. This transit excludes every interior moment.

(2) The process of a truth is fidelity (to the event), i.e. the evaluation, using a specific operator (that of fidelity), of the degree of connection between the terms of the situation and the supernumerary name of the event.

A truth is (...)in substance, a procedure of post-eventual fidelity which will have been generic. In this sense, a truth (indiscernible within knowledge), is the metonymy of the situation’s very being – i.e. of a pure or unnamed multiple into which this being is resolved.

(a) A subject is not a substance. If the word substance has a meaning, it designates a multiple which is counted as one in a situation. The intrinsic indiscernibility into which a generic procedure resolves excludes a subject’s being substantial.

(b) Nor is a subject an empty point. The void, which is a proper name of being, is inhuman and a-subjective. It is an ontological concept. In addition, it is clear that a truth is realized as multiplicity and not as punctuality.

(d) A subject is not an invariant of presentation. The subject is scarce in that the generic procedure runs diagonally to the situation. One could add that each subject is rigorously singular, being the generic procedure of a situation which is itself singular. The statement “there is subject” (il y a du sujet) is uncertain or haphazard: it is not transitive with respect to being.

(e) A subject is neither a result nor an origin. He is the local status of the procedure, a configuration which exceeds the situation."
Reference: http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?p=331

So life's nature for us as subjects (if we are subjects of course), namely it being irresistible and unbearable simultaneously, becomes more clear as subject itself is defined with this tension, this nothing-else-than-a-rythmic-movement between infinite and finite. Like every music is true, understood in this way subject is true if not truth itself (I exaggerated there a little by saying I am the truth, actually the whole point is that I am not the truth or some other kind of thing but I am an inbetween tension).


My fundamental belief is that I am true.
It is not just a belief, that's why I am adding "fundamental" there. It is the ground on which I operate.

If why is the question for an explanation, "why not?" is the interruption to causality. As a subject I don't have a cause to be, I am myself the interruption of that cause and effect. Just like the question "why not?" always searches for a hole in the meaning, I, understanding myself in this way -true to my nature as a tension between finite and infinite- become an engine of truth, tearing down the banale veil of meaning. Constantly running away from being fixed to some point or the other as in causality, but doing so very naturally as the infinite and finite are both guiding me. Where? There is no where, where is the wrong question. There is just the realization of me at every moment as an art piece: randomly taking shape but it becomes something very interesting during.

But I cannot allow myself to vibrate freely if I think that somethig's wrong with me fundamentally. Or if I fix myself just in the finite without having a concept of infinite as the most abstract and simultaneously the most concrete thing that one could ever imagine. So my thinking goes like this: trust both finite and infinite, they will make good music. Or to put another way, for music to be, we need the infinite to form a plane for it and just as we trust the ground when we walk on it, we have to trust it to be true. I imagined truth in Badiou as the very possibility of a play ground as infinite. Everyone has a tendency...

So maybe you are asking what does all this have anything to do with Kundera? Well, he was just for demonstration of simultaneity. Irresistible would be the infinite and unbearable, the finite in my case. Lightness of being comes from this lingering thinking in between.

Maybe...nevertheless it is beautiful now and here, alone with this thought. I will be here for a while.