May 20, 2005

The Ends of Man

"The working bourgeois, to become a - "satisfied" - Citizen of the "absolute" State, must become a Warrior - that is , he must introduce death into his existence, by consciously and voluntarily risking his life, while knowing that he is mortal." (Alexandre Kojeve)

Hegel's attempt to resolve the subject/object dualism is the same task that Advaita Vedantists, Zen Buddhists and other nondualists have attempted throughout "history." What is novel is the stress on history and the idea of man as a whole completing this task. Is it necessary for man as whole to complete this task for it to be complete?

The unfolding of Being as objective natural space by means of Negation as subjective historical time so beautifully recapitulates the whole trajectory of philosophy (and of man), we could only wonder what would be left other than Bataille's "unemployed negativity," or the "painful tooth in Hegel's mouth." If the first is Europe in the 30s or America in the 70s catching a glimpse of this real, then the second is the symptom by means of which we as a species keep avoiding the end.

Enter Freud the scientist discovering this symptomatic state by which the master-slave dialectic is carried on beyond war and even beyond political economy toward (what Hegel and Marx could not foresee) the question of meaning itself - the individual myth of the neurotic and the real-imaginary-symbolic war of a body-mind in turmoil.

Even this individual myth of the neurotic is quaint in comparison to the post-60s emergence of "techonology and nihilism," the pure war of adult toys trying desperately to outrun the void.

The working bourgeois who is slave to capital is now (also) the castrated subject dialectically revolving around desire and repression in a fashion-oriented society of the spectacle, "Japanized" into petty wars of "snobbery," hipsterism, and the "art world" filled with anything but artists - pseudo-subjects traded on the market of "objective" beauty, style, and fame in which the stakes change every 15 minutes because of course nothing is true (only cool) even as their biopathic bodies betray them to the false surprise of everyone around.

The question: is this divided subject of the "unconscious" inevitable or is there an end to analysis in which Freud's Drive and Lacan's Desire of the Analyst provide an answer to Hegel.

If Man is the negation/subtraction of infinite multiple Being, then Spirit is the self-conscious negation/subtraction of infinite multiple being.

If Man disappears at the end of History, he does not sink back into the natural space of being. Rather he mutates like a butterfly into what he always was (becoming) - Spirit - and the natural world of Being is taken up into this Spirit which is nothing other than the infinite multiple and its other name, the void, as what continues to negate that which appears. The body and its natural environment is taken up into the spirit-man as the voiding animal who has consciously and voluntarily introduced death into his existence.

The Warrior is not (only) the working bourgeois become citizen of the absolute state, but the divided subject become spirit-man living the drive as creative simulacra, the sinthome as desiring production, the sovereign of nothing, the zen samurai without a lord, the overcoming of man in the ubermensch - and its world is neither global psychoanalytic communism, nor animal night, nor the city of god but ... the advent.

Alain Badiou "Logics of Worlds"
Georges Bataille "Sovereignty"
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari "A Thousand Plateaus"
Leonard Cohen "Beautiful Losers"
Philip Dick "Valis"
Marguerite Duras "Destroy She Said"
Pierre Klossowski "Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle"
Rudolph Steiner "Philosophy of Freedom"
Wilhelm Reich "Cosmic Superimposition"

Posted by scott at May 20, 2005 09:15 PM | TrackBack
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