Sunday, February 11, 2018

The quixotic, ethics, the void of practice and desire, the heterotopic, and the image's murder

1.
We mistake our kindness with kindness, our truth with the truth, our love with love, our justice with justice. It's back to the quixotic dilemma. When does a concept become real in practice? Practice is the paradoxical space of desire. There is no such thing as a "material practice" of a concept that escapes the quixotic.

2.
In the world, ethics is possibly a luxury, infinitely difficult to separate from politics. Ethics, if it is really ethics, should not be under the sway of any politics. Ethics, to be ethics, should be under nothing else but ethics. It is only and solely in this condition that it can be truly Ethics. (Cf. Derrida)

3.
You push the limits of your context until you reach the point of exhaustion, where you are between pure nakedness and paradox. That's when it all begins, at the end of everything. Even if we are surrounded by great ideas, in the void of practice where we are, we forge our own tools in the sea of doubt and the impossible. Is this utter nakedness inhabited by pure violence, this space where all consolations are sucked dry--the space of the inconsolable being (Rilke: Who if I cried out would hear me among the angels' hierarchy?), the birthplace of art (Cf. Blanchot)? Writing is like starting a business in the midst of bankruptcy, a mode of survival, and only of survival.

4.
Why do we dream up another space that we want to be as immersive as the "real" ones we currently occupy, as if they always lacked something, as if we were not at home where we are, and that the heterotopic was needed to "house" the being we aspire or imagine to be?

5.
The image is structured by both Eros and Thanatos, life and death. This is the reason the image is the source of both Fascination and Fear, the spring from where "emotions" arise in all their ambiguous essence. As the object of both Fascination and Fear, the image inspires fixation or separation; we flee from it or we desire to unite with it, or both by its simulated murder. (In what world can one rid oneself of the image?) Isn't this the stalker's dilemma, trapped in the circle of his or her own images? Maybe we are all haunted.

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