tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post208363257970221438..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Roger Caillois among the NonhumansCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-12776637043151224772008-07-03T17:49:00.000-04:002008-07-03T17:49:00.000-04:00Another thought, or shared citation, in relation t...Another thought, or shared citation, in relation to Jeffrey's writing here is something I read today in the Introduction [written by Griselda Pollock] to Bracha Ettinger's "The Matrixial Borderspace" [for which I do not know whether I should curse or thank Noreen Giffney, who recommended I read the book--haha],<BR/><BR/>"Ettinger asks us to consider aspects of subjectivity *as encounter* occurring at shared borderspaces between several co-affecting partial-subjectivities that are never entirely fused or totally lost, but share and process, within an always-already minimal difference, elements of each unknown other. This might suggest ways to think not only subjectivity in this abstracted theoretical form, but also in aesthetic encounters of viewers and works of art, as well as ethical and political relations between strange, foreign, irreducible elements of otherness in our encounters with human and even nonhuman events in the world" [p. 3].<BR/><BR/>This book is so weird, disorienting, and cool that I will just have to write a post on it at some point.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-6686071297531606882008-07-03T17:43:00.000-04:002008-07-03T17:43:00.000-04:00Great ghazal, Nicola.Jeffrey: I may have mis-repre...Great ghazal, Nicola.<BR/><BR/>Jeffrey: I may have mis-represented Bersani and Dutoit a bit, in that it is *I* and not *they* who is worried about psychic loss in these "counterinfections" between the human and the nonhuman, whereas Bersani and Dutoit, although they note the possibility [or is it a fact?] of this psychic loss, are themselves very much in sympathy, I think, with what you are sketching out here vis-a-vis the thought and writing of Caillois.<BR/><BR/>Indeed, chapters 1 and 3 of "Forms of Being" [essays on Godard's 1963 film "Contempt" and Terence Malick's "The Thin Red Line," respectively] specifically take up the question of nature in relation to the so-called "human" presence. Of the framing of a certain scene in "Contempt," which is set outdoors against the backdrop of sky, cliffs, and sea, Bersani and Dutoit write,<BR/><BR/>"They [Paul and Camille, the "couple" of the film] move without seeing anything around them, and this disconnectedness has the effect of making the cliff, the sea and the sky seem almost like a painted backdrop. It is not exactly that nature becomes insignificant; indeed, when it is framed as a mere view into which these unseeing, inattentive human figures are deposited, the natural scene becomes just that, a mere scene which, however, perhaps by virtue of this violation of its presence, takes on a somewhat ominous, threatening aspect. . . . Godard positions ["man"/the "human"/the "couple"] within the spaces of nature, suggesting that it profoundly modifies our relation to those spaces by blocking them with dissonant human presences. A blocking that is also kind of emptying: neurotic desire--which may be a tautology--creates voids in space. The lack inherent in the desire that at once separates and cements the passionate couple is replicated by spatial breaks at those points where, as it were, their bodies tear into space. Space becomes discontinuous when it is invaded by these foreign bodies whose inner habitat has the false extensibility of a purely psychic space" [pp. 43-44].<BR/><BR/>For Bersani and Dutoit, it is this "purely [human] psychic space" that needs to be overcome such that we might allow ourselves [and here I catch most strongly the affinity with Caillois's project] "to be seduced into the openness of the imaginary" and this "would define a new relation to space, and especially to the spaces of nature" [p. 68].<BR/><BR/>Further [and here the affinities with Caillois, I believe, grow even stronger],<BR/><BR/>"To lose our fascinating and crippling expressiveness might be the precondition for our moving within nature, moving as appearances registering, and responding to the call of, other appearances" [p. 70].<BR/><BR/>I suppose, again, that *I* am the one who worries about certain psychic losses, about what happens to the human when it is "recycled," in Bersani's and Dutoit's terms, as some sort of "allness" [and I don't, thanks to Jeffrey's comments here, necessarily see this as Caillois's project--since "heavy stuff" still persists in Caillois's estimation]. I think the "reverie" that Caillois was after can only ever be temporary, prepared for but never guaranteed, and at times, dangerous [but only if you have an aversion to the cancellation of the singularity you sometimes like to call "yourself"].Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-19214001272063767672008-07-03T15:20:00.000-04:002008-07-03T15:20:00.000-04:00Wrote a thematically related ghazal.Wrote a thematically related <A HREF="http://thewhim.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-come-think-you-exempt-from.html" REL="nofollow">ghazal</A>.Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27252995321390327872008-07-03T12:03:00.000-04:002008-07-03T12:03:00.000-04:00To try to pick and run with the issue of cosmic/un...To try to pick and run with the issue of cosmic/universal/inhuman wonder, I think that wonder, as an always there 'background' dimension of consciousness (which of course I will insist we must "allow" for all entities, existing things), is something that by definition precedes and exceeds the human. Can we understand, for instance, wonder as a form of *deep memory*? This is what Caillois's stone as the shore of dreaming evokes for me. Being with the stone in wonder and dreaming feels like, without explicitly being, a memory of having been a stone, a memory of being, a sense of containing what one immemorially was. Cf. Plato's account of chora as the space where everything is and which we can only perceive vaguely, 'as if dreaming.' This could be understood as related to ideas of microcosm in a manner that might also deconstruct them, namely, humanism takes man's belonging to the nonhuman and occludes it within idea of *superior* containment, measure of all things, and so on. But back to wonder, not as uniquely human capacity for curiosity about things, but as a tapping into or resonating with (cf. stimmung) a dimension within all being, a place of being before it which "precedes" Dasein, the place from which Dasein evolves. So I would want to read Heidegger's description of the ways the question of being subsists within us, submerged and emerging, as a kind of primal, proto- and extra-human awareness:<BR/><BR/>"And yet, we are touched once, maybe even now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms. Perhaps it strikes only once, like the muffled tolling of a bell that resounds into Dasein and gradually fades away. The question is there in heartfelt joy, for then all things are transformed and surround us as if for the first time, as if it were easier to grasp that they were no, rather than that they are, and are as they are. The question is there is a spell of boredom, when we are equally distant from despair and joy, but when the stubborn ordinariness of beings lays open a wasteland in which it makes no difference to us whether beings are or are not--and then, in a distinctive form, the question resonates once again: Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" (Q. of Metaphysics)<BR/><BR/>So I would say that wonder, as this buried question within being itself, perhaps its very basis as being (and we certainly could use a new cosmic/universal/inhuman ontology of the question!), the ground on which it happens, is always there and that explicit wondering or questioning only discloses it.Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-50982156198071359702008-07-03T11:42:00.000-04:002008-07-03T11:42:00.000-04:00Thanks, Nicola -- that means a lot to me, and I wi...Thanks, Nicola -- that means a lot to me, and I will check out Cabinet Magazine, about which I know nothing.<BR/><BR/>Eileen, I'm glad you brought in Bersani and Dutoit. I'd want to emphasize, though, that for Caillois -- as for, I think Deleuze -- a statement like "the lightness of imaginary being is an ontological gain, but it is also a psychic loss" would not ring true, first, because there is nothing light about the fantastic for Caillois; it's as heavy as materialism comes, and hence his obsession with the geological (an obsession shared, I add, by D&G, with their meditations on strata, as well as by Manuel De Landa, who really ran with it). Another way of putting this is that Caillois is far less interested in what losses humans might "suffer" if they are dispossessed of their ontological privilege than he is in mapping the ways in which that ontology is already cosmic, and inhuman, rather than something unique to us. Heavy stuff and artistic gains is how he would frame it, I believe. The "lessness" of B&D he'd likely see as nostalgic, anthropocentric -- or, more likely, he wouldn't remark upon it at all, because such elegiac or cautious tendencies are not really a part of him. He leaves so much that simply does not interest him to silence.<BR/><BR/>As to your own question "I wonder, too, how any of this can be 'wondered,' outside the human": I think Caillois's answer would be that it already has been wondered, and that this cosmic/universal/inhuman wondering is what ought to provoke us to stop assuming that art, imagination, the fantastic, even POV are the possessions of humans alone, rather than phenomena evident in a much wider world.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-53531018669298407892008-07-02T20:49:00.000-04:002008-07-02T20:49:00.000-04:00I am particularly struck here by the mention that ...I am particularly struck here by the mention that Caillois [according to his recent editor and translator Claudine Frank]<BR/><BR/>"was engaged in composing a kind of 'reverie' that could engender a 'subversive, revolutionary New Science,' interrogating rather than dismissing the imaginative and the fantastic,"<BR/><BR/>because this leads me [as it often does] to consider the place of wonder and enchantment in ethical life [something I have thought about a lot since reading Jane Bennett's "The Enchantment of Modern Life"]. More and more, I think a suspension of the so-called "rational" and "reasonable" faculties in favor of Caillois's "reverie" of the fantastic might be critical [maybe even essential] for an ethics that could finally shake off the last vestiges of the type of Western-centric rational "humanism" that has led to so much harm.<BR/><BR/>And I wonder what some of the affinities might be between Caillois's idea, as Jeffrey frames it here, of<BR/><BR/>"an anti-utilitarian conception of the nonhuman that moves us beyond its normalizing function into a realm where human and nonhuman counterinfect, where all kinds of bodies lose the rigor of their boundaries and become anomalous,"<BR/><BR/>and Bersani and Dutoit's idea [in "Forms of Being"], that<BR/><BR/>"the aesthetic subject is not a monumentalising of the self, but rather should be thought of as a renewable retreat from the seriousness of stable identities and settled being."<BR/><BR/>But there is a caution, too, in Bersani and Dutoit, which I would highlight here:<BR/><BR/>" . . . the lightness of imaginary being is an ontological gain, but it is also a psychic loss. An artful ascesis is the precondition for a lessness that allows us to reoccur, differently, everywhere."<BR/><BR/>I wonder, too, how any of this can be "wondered," outside the human.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-52180234084630766272008-07-02T11:32:00.000-04:002008-07-02T11:32:00.000-04:00Love this Jeffrey. Why not be aninormal! Everythin...Love this Jeffrey. Why not be aninormal! Everything already is.<BR/><BR/>The most recent issue of Cabinet Magazine has an article on Caillois in case you haven't seen it. His calling stones l'oree du songe, shore of dreaming, is amazing.Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.com