What is Absurdity ?

    It is worthwhile to ask this question again, since Forgetting is an insatiable beast:

    What is Absurdity?

     It is easy to oppose it to Law and think that, like following the Law, nothing is easier to do. Yet, to be absurd is both the hardest and the easiest to do. Hardest because we always see our actions as following some universal principle, and easiest because Absurdity, like the Law we feel we do without effort, is also what we cannot but do with the smallest effort. The difference is tiny, and it lies in our belief in whether what we do or not do is founded on our ability to know the nature and meaning of the action that we choose to do.

     Hence, if we say to ourselves, ''I'm going to commit an absurd act'' and think it is equal to saying ''I'm going to do a lawful act,'' or an act that we assume, under the banner of the rational, follows a rule like grammar or an ethic or a positive system: then that intention cannot be absurd. In short, you don't wake up one day and say I will be absurd. It's not something you intend, the same way that you cannot say, ''Today I will make time flow.'' But equally you can't say I will follow this or that Law, not because you can't follow a rule or law, but because, like time, law is what the universe follows whether we like it or not.

     That's why absurdity is hard: we follow a rule inevitably, whether we are aware or not, whether we intend it or not. To be absurd is hard because you need to be outside the universe to do it intentionally, and yet at the same time the easiest exactly when you want to do it intentionally. Everything we do, therefore, is the instantiation of Law. And this is the very basis of Absurdity, not its opposite, that law is inescapable, so that to try to enact it is what absurdity really is. It is not the opposite of Law or Meaning. What is absurd is to affirm that this act or that sentence follows this law or has this meaning. It is not the affirmation of the Meaningless, but the assertion that the act we do or words we say follow a rule or meaning we say they do. In short, absurdity is actually affirming this or that rule or meaning, because we never know which rule or meaning we act out, and eventually we act out one or the other, without the need to follow, like the lack of need to follow Time.

     This affirmation is what is absurd because there is no need to say or think it, and yet, we inevitably say or think it. What is absurd is that exactly and to say ''that exactly.'' And this is the reason that, like in Beckett or Ionesco, reason is itself what is absurd. The very fact of the inevitability of thinking this or that, sensing this or that, the very fact that I can't avoid a meaning or a rule in thought and action, makes my presence in the universe redundant because my thought or meaning is a superfluity, especially when I think that what I think is a mirror of the universe or reality. Why does the universe or reality need a mirror? And yet we are bound to make or be one, simply by being here and having thoughts or using language.

    This superfluity, this excess, this unavoidable doubling, and the awareness of it, is the beginning of the notion of the Absurd. Or you may also equally say: the beginning of Thought. Thus, if we get into the habit of thinking, and feel that this mirroring is smooth and without paradoxical status, is to avoid or evade vainly what must be, and absurdly be, a problematic ethic of our attempt at rationality, especially when that rationality does not see its limits or limitation, an absolute reason that we feel or we presume we exercise every day with every word or action, as a matter of course. To be absurd, then, is not to be irrational, but to be aware both of the superfluity and of the inevitability of rationality.     

(January 2018)