Discussion Papers on Contemporary Philosophy

Fidelity to the matter and method of phenomenology

On Heidegger and the Paradox of Human Decision and an essay on Vattimo

Memory of Iligan

Let us think again of being young,
This time, if it can be said at all,
Without time bothering us.
It’s useless if we have our timepieces
Tick-a-tocking a juju we knew best,
The sound of a creaking bed.

For once in the life of a leaf a stem
Has no purpose but an aid to magic
With which a river becomes mouthful,
Night becomes day, dullness a playhouse,
Wit a baby, whisper a creation.

It happens when a tree sheds its tears,
When the leaves meet their fate above the torrent,
Knowing too well they have lost their hearts.

…

Think of the breeze while we drift across the waters,
Make it noble this time, imperfectly immaculate.
Imagine ourselves carrying refugees in our arms,
The sick, the dying, the homeless and wounded.

Not the tourists we used to dream up with leaves,
Not the poets we cared about becoming;

Not the words with which to glide without wings,
The conceits our nimble hands can craft in darkness.

Not the spiders on deserted rocks, not the shadows
We cast on shores only us knew where.

Prelim to A Therapy Session

What is the face of the sun when it’s aging?
It is like asking a tree to die. And die without
Leaving a trace of sorrow. A tree that doesn’t show
A face, or because its lack of face beats any sorrow.
Pity the living that shows so much face.

I don’t expect you to understand me.
I came from a far-flung place only children believe exists.
There sorrow is everything, too familiar to count as truth.

What is truth but of pulling one’s feet off the ground?

Is it sound to ask a tree its gender? The sun if it ever tried
Cooling its feet on a stream? A watercourse breaking
The ramparts of poetry that knows too much about what
Is human and so what a face is all about?

Come with me.
I can show you what you can’t imagine.

Just tell me everything you need to show.
A tree shall be the witness.
I have only two things to ask of you.

Bring me that tree.
Try to make it sing.
Then, as I hope to satisfy you, I shall make you cry.

I shall make you wipe your face,
Make you more capable of poetry,
Of your “full monty and the holy grail.”

In the meantime try hard not to open your eyes.
It’s “monty python” by the way.
But I can keep a secret.

(inspired by “Donnie Darko”)

Mantra of the Apolitical: On Zizek and ‘Ramona’

Zizek’s mantra of the apolitical

For all his credentials as a theorist of social change Slavoj Zizeks’ uncanny take on the real culprit behind the capitalist debacle on managing a deepening crisis of global economy is like crapping out a game we thought he knew how to play and play better.

In his usual display of Marxist sensibility by quoting an ex-Maoist Alain Badiou, Zizek proudly claims that questions of political democracy are better left to the everyday non-discursive play of human freedom (Zizek described it as an “apolitical network of social relations”: see “Democracy is the Real Enemy,” London Review of Books, October 28, 2011), not to the political mechanisms of liberal capitalist democracy that ironical indeed encourages peaceful protests. Zizek observes: “Badiou was right to say that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire, exploitation, or anything of the kind but democracy: it is the ‘democratic illusion’, the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the only legitimate means of change, which prevents a genuine transformation in capitalist relations.”

Zizek is at lost here especially when he extended his observations on how the protesters of Occupy Wall Street can demand change from global capitalist system. To all likelihood Zizek wants the protesters to draw the fine line between illusion and a manageable phantasmagoric relation to the Real (the uncanny provenance of human freedom). The experience of this kind of freedom has a counterpart in Marxist literature, namely, ‘political democracy’. Zizek concludes his essay via a trademark recourse to his familiar Lacanian lens, warning the protesters not to demand the Real (as did, he argued, by the failed revolutionaries of May 1968 in France) for demanding even a taste of it is sure to fall into a trap disguised as enjoyment. Sure enough, the term he would have brandished though he must have realized it’s too omnipresent in his texts and speeches to call attention to, jouissance. Roughly speaking it means enjoying too much that enjoyment only strengthens the structural (social) and natural prohibition against its own expression.

By warning the protesters not to provoke the master (the global capitalist system) Zizek is arguing more or less that any unnecessary provocation can further deepen the crisis against which the protests were organized. For all its proverbial dependence on chaotic mode of production, capitalism cannot tolerate more disturbing protests. The most dangerous provocation lies in demanding a change of subjective space in the collective social domain between the master and the slave, between the 1 percent and the 99 percent relative to the income and wealth distribution pie. It must have occurred to Zizek that he sounds more Hegelian than Marxist especially in terms of his proximate warning against provoking another historical shift into nihilism where the only thing that changes is the subjective space, an extended internal time consciousness (realistically speaking, a ‘class’) inhabited and run by a triumphant subject-agency that has taken possession of a historical Geist, in the case of Zizek’s warning, the prospect of the working class or the 99 percent of the world’s population, discriminated by property ownership, keeping a tight rein on capital. But he sounds more Lacanian when he conclusively shifts his argument from caution to prescription: “the formal gesture of rejection…is more important than its positive content, for only such a gesture can open up the space for new content.” In Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is no way one can acquire the full comforts of the Real in terms of positive enjoyment that does not in any way reincribe the Real in its very essence as unfulfillable as an object of human desire. But where does Zizek want to see the protests leading?

He takes up Lacan to remind the protesters not to demand real transformation (as hysterics always do) through changing the subjective position of the master into that of the triumphant slave, recalling Lacan’s words to the revolutionaries of May 1968: “As revolutionaries you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one” (Democracy is The Real Enemy).

Zizek fires a shot at proverbial Marxist slogans of direct empowerment (such as workers’ council, etc.) in terms of brandishing a totem called political democracy that has seen better days. Zizek warns us against believing that democracy in capitalism can offer opportunities for empowerment which Marxism, from the First International to Lenin, had taken advantage of in the interest of pursuing tactical goals for the working class though Marx and Lenin did not harbor any illusion that bourgeois democracy can put an end to the exploitative system of division of labor, property ownership and capital accumulation. Drawing on Louis Althusser the Slovenian thinker argues that bourgeois democracy is an integral part of the Ideological State Apparatuses, a type of public empowerment that guarantees freedom to own property and invest, and freedom to assemble and demand improvements of labor (at least in modern times), whereupon the tenacity of the new global capitalism rests. It suffices to say that the protesters themselves should make an effort to block the logical movement of history from political democracy (such as benefiting from higher wages, advantageous capital-labor compromises that help delay the pace of capitalist plunder of national and global economy, labor-related benefits, etc.) to direct ownership and control of the means of production, from capitalism to socialism. Zizek simply argues that any sense of freedom in capitalist order is false and illusory, that political democracy in capitalism is not historically transitory rather permanently inauspicious. More to the point, he argues against any sense of historical dialectics. History does not move. It is resistant to change.

But Zizek also argues that freedom can flourish within the “apolitical network of social relations,” outside of the sphere of the political, such as the family. Here, Zizek betrays his poor grasp of Marx. He believes that the family is impermeable to capital. The family plays an important role for Zizek, and unfortunately he likes to impress for Marxism as well—it ensures radical change needed to transform capitalism by transforming the ‘social relations of production’ which he mistakenly associates with the emancipatory apolitical promise of the family. But what family is he talking about? Is it the biological structure in which natural selection plays the game of the survival of the species or the modern social act of reproduction in the interest of one’s birthright, heirloom or legacy, defined by juridical terms of property ownership? None of these structures will satisfy the Zizekean alternative of the apolitical in terms of transforming the transcendent, that is, social relations of production precisely because these structures, the genetic and the social, are already inscribed within a specific economy which is always accompanied by the political as any potential to build and expand on a given material condition. It matters less if the political has been perfected by the human species: As long as there is culture pervasive in higher presumably reflexive life forms (which is rooted in self-preservation) the political is always a given possibility. The crux of the matter is that any effort to transcend the sociality of economic relations is bound to repeat the transcendentality of the political. This time it sounds totally deterministic.

But that is the closest thing to Zizek’s Lacanian hang-over (after taking an insufficient dose of Marxism, he must have gone on a free Lacanian binge). For Lacan the Real takes the place of the evolutionary bind which holds life hostage to the death instinct. Any sense of comfort that life takes in between is only a false illusion of freedom or enjoyment. But even that is suspect and Zizek should be the first one to deny that enjoyment (all the more, a false one) is attainable even in the synthetic landscape of experience where, if Kant was right, it is achievable by means of correct judgements. Nonetheless, it is also the ability to form correct judgement that Zizek to all appearances aimed to make a pitch for by warning the protesters of Wall Street not to demand the Master to relinquish his position. The best thing to do is to remain sufficiently hysteric, no more than that. That’s the correct judgement.

But let us give Zizek the benefit of doubt. Let us say he is imagining something close to the ancient understanding of social relations which flourished in friendship, in philia. But he can hardly be imagined imagining Plato, the Marxist that he claims himself to be, or the Lacanian that stands for his credentials (his mastery of the case studies and clinical experiences of Lacan who did a Humean trick to him, who awakened him from his Marxist slumber, the Lacan who had a very low opinion of philosophy as meaningless sophistry).

What can we still imagine of Zizek imagining he is a Marxist?

Surprisingly, this leads us to Ramona Bautista, named co-conspirator to the gruesome murder of his brother Ramgen Bautista apparently in a conflict over monetary support.

Ramona and her Zizekean alibis

We mean a Zizekean alibi as the pitch for truth and nothing but the truth. But there is more to that. Zizek, for all his twist and turn as a Marxist, a Leninist and a Lacanian, has come to embody an alibi best suited for a defense before the bar of public opinion. The alibi, as we had mentioned earlier, is to remain sufficiently hysteric before the indifferent face of the Real which this time is supposed to hold a secret. In the case of Ramgen’s murder the secret is the mastermind behind the crime.

Ramona’s retraction and her latest taped message are clear examples of a Zizekean alibi, taking advantage of the postmodern turn into the virtual power of the Real. The more virtual the Real the more real the Real becomes. That is what it’s supposed to mean—that the Real is not so real to begin with. But that is also what the Real likes to show by unshowing itself. It shows, yet shy of showing its secret which keeps its secret a mystery to ponder and especulate on, that it contains no less than nothing. To all symbolic intents and purposes, the Real is playing hard to get.

Ramona was of course lying judging by the fact that she retracted her statements. She issued a third statement recorded on a video earlier before she fled to Hongkong the reason for which, according to her fat mother (I am trying to be objectively descriptive), was to escape being unduly judged by public opinion. In the video (it was so stupid not to cut out the portion where she was caught bungling a scripted message) she denounced what she claimed to be a mistake by the police for implicating her as co-conspirator of her younger brother in the killing of their elder sibling. In the video she appeared sufficiently hysterical, something Zizek would be happy about. Of course, no one would expect Ramona to admit she did it or was part of the crime. If she did it would be the end of entertainment industry. The public would have maligned Ramona’s lie. What the public expected was for Ramona to sufficiently lie and she did what was expected. She satisfied public expectation about the crime that many also expect to become one of the hottest reality shows on TV, replete with twists and turns that pander to public taste. The public now considers Ramona a hot property, regardless whether she was part of the crime or not, regardless whether her version of the crime was real or not. With Ramona’s latest alibi she satisfied a Zizekean observation regarding virtual reality in which “reality is experienced as reality without being one.” The most crucial thing about this is that the public knows that something is wrong with Ramona and we are happy about it.  We don’t expect Ramona to spoil the Real.

In this case the worst thing Ramona can do is to insult the public by telling what the public doesn’t expect her to tell, that is, to tell a lie insufficiently. Let us hazard an alibi to that effect. What about drawing attention to the necessary pure monetary angle of the crime that only those who are sufficiently poor can commit. Is Ramona sufficiently poor? Nah. The poor majority of the public can start an endless tit for tat. Only those who are sufficiently rich (the poor wonders why a rich man wants more riches?) can be dissatisfied with what they have. To be sufficient in life means to become more capable of getting richer. But Zizek’s warning resonates here in a similar fashion as does concerning the question of provoking global capitalism. Do not unnecessarily disturb the system of riches which literally depends on literal deprivation of others. It spoils the Real by being too realistic about one’s poverty such as to make a stupid claim (intended to unmask the stupidity of the sufficiently rich) that one can be satisfied with being poor that is why he cannot kill his brother for money.

Either side is as good as nothing because the Real, or any claim to the effect of getting to the bottom of it, is nothing. Ramona (and the public as well, but the challenge falls more heavily on the former who awakened the public from the slumber of having to make do with consuming a flurry of crimes shown on TV, all irrational and senseless, that is, devoid of pure human interest!) should not be allowed under all circumstances to reveal the void there is beyond the face of truth. This approximates what Zizek describes as a “reversal [which] resides in the ultimate impossibility to draw a clear distinction between deceptive reality and some firm positive kernel of the Real: every positive bit of reality is a priori suspicious since (as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real).

Even if Ramona changes her mind and confesses to the crime as a co-conspirator her admission will not amount to the absolute resolution of the crime precisely because, if Zizek is right, the Real is no less than nothing.  The Real is more than itself. As nothing the Real is ‘more’ than its appearance as the repository of truth, its ultimate witness. Hegel got it correct when he said that “the real is rational,” the rational being the more of the real. This more of the real is the product of reason, of the rational rationalizing itself. This form of self-mimicry produces a simulacrum of the Same. Nonetheless, it is not perfectly the same, only a simulacrum. Now, if Ramona acted as a co-conspirator then she is part of the rational structure of the crime, not its physical structure such as the actual execution of a plot to murder her brother. She did not kill her brother, she only thought of killing him, so to speak. But the Real is rational. For a plotter who denied involvement in the crime the rational, nonetheless, is less culpable if not completely independent of the crime itself. For she must have understood what Zizek means when the Slovenian thinker said that the Real is no other than the name for the Void. Building on this assumption, the plotter therefore made a correct judgement when she chose to play the hysteric and sufficiently so by rationalizing her alibi. The more rational the Real is the more it is real. Nothing more is Real than the more into which it shows its emptiness. We have learned another thing here: the best discoverer of the noble lie is not the guardians of Plato rather those with criminal minds. What is the noble lie? For one, the lie that the real is rational. What is noble about this lie is that no one in her right mind can conspire to kill one’s kin. Blood is thicker than water. That’s another noble lie.

But what is Zizek’s moral stance on the Real, if we may ask?

Zizek has paradoxical answers to everything that falls under his Lacanian lens. Take note of his following observations:

“The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real).

We have reasons to suppose that for Zizek the Real is not totally omnipresent. He did in fact point out the apolitical promise of changing our understanding of how to demand of the Real, beyond the market, beyond the political structure of capital, the family.

In Ramona’s latest alibi she lamented the perception of the public that she could betray her own family that stemmed from conflict over money that Ramgen was alleged to have hoarded for his own sake at the expense of his other eight siblings. The monthly financial support came from their father, now bound to the wheelchair due to sickness and old age, a former action star and senator of the Republic who is known to have fathered 72 children from 16 women, lean and stout.

It is textbook knowledge already that movies and politics have become the true semblance of the Real where total annihilation and violence are tempered by the virtuality of a narrative that the screen brings to life, which, if critics of film violence are right, contributes to real violence out there by inciting sadistic passion among the viewers. This is the case where the semblance of the Real produces a real effect which if anything is the Real itself. Nothing is more real than the effect of nothing, the Real.

Would it therefore make sense to say that the promise of the apolitical to escape the absurdity of the Real is to nourish a family? The family as the opposite of the Real where everything nurtured by the personal can be destroyed by the political and the economics of life support? Is there such thing as a family impervious to capital?

To all appearances Zizek doesn’t know the answers. Ah, the Marxist that he is.

Back to Ramona. A netizen, reacting on her version of the crime has the following words to say:”Tanungin niyo si Gloria at Mike if nagsasabi ng totoo si Ramona” (Ask former President Gloria Arroyo and her husband Mike if Ramona was telling the truth/my translation).

It may be recalled that former President Arroyo once admitted on television her guilt over the alleged massive electoral fraud in Mindanao that ensured her victory in the 2004 national elections. She successfully completed her term as if admitting guilt amounted to nothing.

Counting the Planet

At least I heard two people, all of them female, with the exception of the male taxi driver who provoked a short conversation on population numbers while we were entering one of the adjacent streets leading to North Cemetery, had managed to drop a comment on the latest world population figures complemented by the unusual throng of people rushing to the biggest cemetery in Manila to pay respects to their dead.

One or two things could explain why among the untold volume of people that is making the familiar streets leading to the main entrance a veritable human traffic nightmare only two would have found the population stats a worthy distraction to get by while the noise, the hustle and the garbage have occupied the center stage of all souls’ day (officially all saints’ day) celebration in one of the most proletarianized holiday activity hubs in Manila. Either these people were the only ones who managed or chose to snap up a conversation with a symbolic impact, that of the 7 billion world population mark in the way the human traffic around the vicinity had created an accurate mental picture of a world gone chock-a-block, or it simply took their minds earlier hooked by the media’s fascination about the 7 billionth baby who’s to be born on October 31, 2011. Oh, his or her mother must not only be proud but lucky, sort of meaningless  newscast.

Measured against the absolute population that made it to the area where I was observing people come by there could be countless others, male ones included, who could have talked about the same topic and yet failed to reach my ears. But that’s how nature works. I could only hear so much or I would be reduced into a sleepless automaton seeing, hearing, absorbing everything. It was Nietzsche who warned me to curb my insomnia—to see everything is a thankless diversion.

I was taking cover from the hustle and bustle under a tree to the right of the exit gate of North Green Park (I excused myself from my folks hanging it out in front of my father’s grave) when I heard the first mother along with a younger looking female colleague as they were passing along the exit path briskly talk out loud about her fascination, unmindful of the symbolic suggestion of her naiveté. He could have been my fourth son, and how lucky he’s got a scholarship already! Of course, the only thing that got in the way of her conceiving and giving birth to the 7 billionth baby was that she and her partner failed to have sex at the exact day and time. Some mothers are not only lucky. They also knew timing, so it seemed.

The other female subject I heard talking about the same topic (except for a minor contrast: she was wondering how possible it is to count all the people in the entire planet) was the same subject who messed up my change of 10 pesos from the bill of 20 that I paid for a 10-peso Zesto juice.  “If these were her children (I saw six little young ones, four male, and two female, lounging around her as she plied her trade), she sure knows how to count,” I whispered to myself. She gave me 50. I inserted the 50 in my right pocket.

No. It didn’t end there.

I ordered one red pack of Marlboro. I gave her 40 pesos which I took from my left pocket. I took a cigarette from an open sachet and lit it. I placed three pesos worth of coins on top of a red candy container lid. “Yes, if you order a pack it goes out with discount,” quipped the middle-aged lady who was so quick to guess what I was about to ask: for 3 pesos each stick, how come I only pay 40 pesos for 20? Then, I gestured to leave.

“Hey, mister! You left your cigarettes.”

“I’m coming back to get them. Got to piss, I forgot,” all I wanted to say.

But things turned a little messy. My breakwater, I shall call it, responded like it was too irritated to tell me: “Don’t you take me for your cover!”

“Wtf!” I managed to yell, silently.

It sure didn’t know a thing about Rawls or a juju.

But there was no portable toilet in sight. Only signs that read “No Smoking.”

To Hermione and a wannabe

 

This thoughtless anoesis of yours can very well
Disambiguate

A history of fiction—
A relapse

Into sickness by any means—even Nietzsche
Would balk at if he were alive:

How he hates that recipe for ruin, this self-transparency!

Your tasteless Manichean twofold.
Ah! That cunning confession of poverty

Behind which a desire of yours slinks
Like a guilty spider
Imagining herself as a tourist.

And heaven forbid!

This desire to be helped. This showmanship
More dreadful than autocracy!

One would suppose Vallejo knew Nietzsche—

A meeting between a communist
And a confused armadillo
Staring in awe at the pangolins of savanna.

Come then and take this insult.
Where did you get those tough plates?
Did you ask the stars why can’t you
Even recognize your face?

But it’s not your ferly face.

It’s not even those hideous eyebrows.
It is rather this—

The face of your nightfall isn’t Diotima’s.

Business Matters

The past months had been too pointless for Godot and whatever in Beckett this thing is named it is certainly useless. Useless for everything it stands for beyond the culpability of language. What then is a juju?

With magical powers it is thought to possess a juju can fire a gun even if God is watching. On one side of the moon, a stranger, too close to God, utters a wish that He can’t refuse.

One can wonder now who occupies the other side of the moon. What use is “The Night When Abraham Called to the Stars?”

Was it Bly? Was it everything that truth mistakes for sadness, for solemnity?

Did he ask God for justice? How much did he pay Him?

Did He issue a receipt?

Remembering the times of Kafka and Jesenská

 

Just for now, let’s set off into a time
When just about everything was old.

Old enough to recall if
It was a time
In a pipe dream of tourists
Thinking
They were spiders.

Was it like you once told me?
Was it credible enough

To tell someone his age?
Was it just a while telling us to love and forget?

Ah! Let’s set off a tune that we alone can hear.
“Help me remember your time.
Take me deep into your space.”

Was it like you once whispered in my ear?
Did you like how it made you sing a juju?

Is Kafka a place called shore?

(To Eve Ensler)

How to fill you?
That bothers my pen.
If only you were the darkness I crave.
Your parity can make all truths simmer

Before they boil,
Before Nietzsche’s eyes
Turn bleary
From everything that sizzles.

This tickles your fancy.
Must be your teddy
Guarding the gaffe
That’s called your unspoiled state?

How to sadden your ulcers?
That bothers my night.
They have never known the solitude
Of the king-size, home to your impeccable
Virginity, was it your poetry?

How to gag your lips?
How do elephants vanish in the sea?
How to make you end yourself
Like night gives way to day?

‘Kafka’ and the weight of lingering sands

UN Avenue Encore

“That evening

everyone was gripped by
the traffic of clouds above.
By the book, this happens
every time an angel arrives…”

 

How is it that she’s not sure if the sands are dry?

Do they ever get dry? Do they ever want to speak of oceans?

Of angels darting above the breakers cresting in silence?

Of secrets buried in the seabed where all gods repose?

 

Can the moon carry the weight of their destiny

Like a man carries the weight of his pocket?

Can angels swim like the fish?

 

 

Musings (Woman)

Woman

Free at last a woman is like a leaf
dreamily embracing the river.
Below the aestival torrent
the moon is hiding her silvery rage.
She hates her daughter
offering to drench her stalks in the cold flux.

When life muses heavily,
descends its jarring footsteps on trees,
it is only then that the leaf longs
for the stem from which it was rent apart:

The wind once blew off its whim on her.
She has never been a true leaf.
A non-leaf proposing to swig the river.

When she grows old, the overawed petioles,
the stalks drenched to the tiniest nerve,
the whole leaf stacked to blasé
will grow heavy and sink under.
The moon joins with her,
mother and daughter.

I was staring at the moon,
that ancient of all mammary landscape.
Soon, silence came of the river’s surface,
beneath which a woman.

My ribs were stolen like a tree:
ruddy stumps on its sides.
There are like hundreds of shoots and buds
strewn on a quiet.

Challenges to the Reform of the Social Body

We are centering our discussion here to the limits of ideology’s capability to resolve social problems, specifically, those which are borne of human prejudices as they extend to social systems.

We proceed with a negative view of ideology taking into account the historical circumstances under which ideology can prosper today. These historical circumstances generally indicate that ideology has exhausted its social efficacy to advance meaningful reforms.

One can simply look at the general phenomenon of social disparity in our country, which to say the last, is class-oriented. When we say class-oriented we refer to the classical economic theory of the relation between labor and capital resources. The crux of the matter is that this relation prospers on an asymmetrical basis. If an economy survives because of this asymmetry, there is no other scientific explanation than the fact that asymmetry can manage to balance out the differences between labor and capital. We should not however be misled of understanding this equalizing force as something inherent to the system itself. In fact what helps the system balance out, on the level of social appearance (or social phenomenality) the economic differences is beyond the purview of economy. We are referring here to the political implementation of an economic model, in this case, the classical economic model. As an aside, what today is dubbed as a neo-liberal economic model is nothing less than an extension of a more enhanced political model vis-à-vis the administration of economy. The classical framework is still there, only the political motivations go beyond the founding intentionality of the classical model without destroying it.

Generally speaking an economy is something that does not happen by its own will; rather, it happens by the will of the political. We mean the political, for instance, as a system of running the affairs of the economy as well as the social body as a whole like a political system, a political platform, etc. This chain of causations can go on infinitely. Scientifically speaking, however, the chain of causation stops at the limit of human actions that can cause things, namely, the ideological.

Ideology roughly means a set of belief systems or outlooks which in their raw state, that is, at the crude level of the personal, is deeply rooted in human biases. Biases are formed by two major causalities: the ecological and the bioethical. By ecological we refer to the environment as a whole which may be sub-classified as that in and around which the person is situated, such as the family, the community, the ethnic, the geographic, the national territory, etc. By bioethical we refer to the individuation of the human being, a fundamental learning process of discovery and rediscovery throughout the course of a lifetime. Individuation refers to the process of self-discovery, which may be obtained through experience, formal and informal. The bioethical, however, is by nature weak in terms of its capability to alter the environment. This explains the ethical part of self-discovery: discovery should become a co-constitutive process, a co-discovery with others, in short. The process of co-discovery at times can obtain a sufficient force to alter the ecological dimension by means of reform or revolution through the collective decisionism of individuals forming themselves into a societal force whose primary objective is to transform the status quo of the ecologic. The process of co-discovery may be understood also as a process of devising an ideological plan for the reform of the ecological. But first co-discovery must transform the nature of ideology as personal into the political for it to be an effective saturation mechanism in terms of filtering individual differences.

We can notice here that the inspiration behind the creation of an ideological system is the bioethical which is rich in person-oriented goals. It suffices to say that the bioethical has an equal inherent tendency to become self-absorbed and espouse parochialism. Owing to its natural orientation, the bioethical can become deeply personal, enough to turn its goals and beliefs into an ad hominem system. Such tendency, for instance, characterized the bioethical mode of past human societies, lacking in sufficient opportunities to expand the personal horizon as well as in social mechanisms to push self-empowerment into the dimension of co-empowerment with others. In other words, past societies were limited by the ecological, by their environment. This also means that the bioethical had a limited capability to alter the state of things.

On the advent of modern social formations, the bioethical has been accorded opportunities to alter the ecological which, more than its social environmental connotations, has also extended to the biosphere and the natural physical sphere of ecology. However, this phenomenon is not much to be desired. In the course of self-empowerment, the ecological—both the social and the physical environment as a whole—has taken the hardest blow in terms of population explosion, pollution, displacement of human dwelling, and recently, the phenomenon of climate change. All these are administered to nature and society through massive industrialization, urbanization, or in short, the modernization of human society.

Indeed, modernization has accorded wondrous opportunities for self-empowerment but with steep consequences, not only to the ecologic in general, but also, and more crucially, to the bioethical as a whole. Self-empowerment has turned in on itself by reducing and blocking off access and opportunities for others to empower themselves on equal terms. This is the classical explanation for what modernity has done to human civilization in general, which can also explain the disparity that the classical economic model has tolerated, creating a divide among classes, between the “haves” and the “have-nots”, between the rich and the poor, between the powerful and the oppressed, between elite and mass culture, etc.

The fact that these disparities exist in modern societies wherever they are today indicate that modernity has championed an idea of the bioethical that centers on individualism. Self-empowerment is performed with anticipation of gratifying individualistic goals. True enough these individualistic goals encourage social divisions as they exist today. Class disparities are nothing less than the extensions of individual differences, but at a more enhanced level such that differences are observable in terms of social status, rank, and class that persons occupy. Rank, status, and class are all encrusted with personalistic biases which disguise themselves as social (impersonal) structures which sanction the popular view that persons are simply agents of systems not the active molders and architects of systems themselves. This creates a social consciousness in which persons await their destinies, not as persons who shape their own fates. One way to explain this is the fact that majority believes that to be rich or to be poor is a matter of preordination, such as what most religions teach.

We speak here of the majority as the majority consciousness shaped by modernity. As we have stressed, this consciousness in general is founded on the premise of self-empowerment, of the bioethical transforming the ecological or social landscape. Modernity is about an aggressive promotion of self-empowerment the consequences of which would be too extensive to discuss here. As long as self-empowerment remains the paradigm of modern social existence, the problems it has engendered will continue to beset us. Therefore the resolution lies beyond the modernist paradigm.

This is to say that the bioethical has become ideological in the second degree. The first degree ideological refers to the individuation process that has been overtaken by individualistic goals. Individuation as a process of self-discovery and rediscovery is transformed into a process of self-acquisition, self-aggrandizement, self-territorialization,etc. We have emphasized previously that this form of bioethical learning is weak, in fact, slow in nature vis-à-vis the compelling and aggressive framework of the bioethical as an ideological self-empowerment. Indeed, this weak and slow nature of the ideological in the first bioethical degree is no match to a much stronger, much aggressive form of relating to the ecological or social reality. With massive industrialization and urbanization alone the autochthonous essence of the bioethical has been erased to the point of beyond recognition. The more we modernize human society the less we can rediscover the values of the past which, among others, can teach us the virtue of circumspection, discretion, and the ability to take time before a drastic decision is made such as would encourage a truly democratic exchange of opinions and views before a decision can be made.

In our previous discussion, we have recommended a return to the primordial without being anachronistic. Our discussion here is an elaboration of that option vis-à-vis the problems that modern society confronts today. Among our recommendations is the need to neutralize the aggressiveness of modernity and channel this to a revival of enabling traditional values of the past. One way to do this is to deprive modernity of its effective weapon, namely, its aggressive spirit. This may be done, among others, by depending our social reform agendas less on ideological terms.
August 5, 2009

DO YOU HAVE A FILIPINO?

Not so long ago the word “Filipino“ was a buzzword among affluent families not only in the West but in other developing countries in Asia, such as Hongkong, Taiwan, Singapore and the Middle East. Do you have a “Filipino”? That means if they have hired a housemaid or a house nurse. Filipinos ashore and abroad reacted vehemently to this racial slur which spread over the internet. And only a year ago, a Hongkong writer, whose name sounds like a flat crispy wafer (Chip Tsiao), ignited nationalist fervor when he wrote in a Hongkong magazine that the Philippines had no credibility to claim the Spratly’s, a disputed group of islands in the South East, because we are a “nation of servants.” The Chinese in Hongkong employ thousands of Filipino domestic helpers—how could a servant claim equal footing with his master? China is the most powerful claimant to the Spratly’s.

The tide of history seemed to turn in our favor when little by little many Filipinos made big names abroad in the fields of sports, entertainment, fashion, and the arts, giving the lie to the impression that all Filipinos are housemaids or home aides. Filipino boxing sensation Manny Pacquiao is the most impressive proof that far from the servile and the obsequious the new “Filipino” connotation acquires a stern and competitive meaning. Don’t mess with a Filipino.

In a violent twist of fate, the world had seen how it was to mess with a Filipino when a dismissed Filipino policeman held a number of Hongkong nationals hostage inside a tourist bus, demanding that he be reinstated in the service. Eight Hongkong nationals died during the last ditch effort to rescue the hostages. We are not saying here that the Hongkong nationals messed with a freak and gave them what they deserved. If not someone then something—something freaked the hell out of Captain Mendoza. He feared for his future as a government employee. He feared the future—something larger than his ‘being’. And because it was larger than his immediate self, he lost touch of reality.

But Chip Tsiao also lost touch of reality when he viewed the Filipinos unworthy of the imperial ambitions of their Chinese masters. He lost touch of reality by believing that Filipinos have imperial ambitions like China. He lost touch of reality when he described this former colony of Spain, named after King Charle’s son Philip II, as a nation of servants. He lost touch of reality when he forgot his own nation’s servile history under the British Crown.

But, perhaps, the Chinese government has also lost touch of reality when not long after the hostage-taking incident a Chinese flag was planted on the bottom of the sea where the Spratly’s lie, an imperial (almost surreal) declaration addressed to other less powerful and inferior claimants to the disputed islands. Don’t mess with the Chinese. If last year the question Do you have a Filipino? reverberated over the internet, this year the million dollar question is Do you have a Chinese flag at the bottom of your sea?

 

Meanwhile, some foreign observers have taken the hostage crisis as a point of departure to ask what it must take for this society of ours to really mature as a people. They say that because we have developed a culture where competitiveness does not figure in our collective psyche a sort of cultural lethargy has taken a toll on our collective destiny as a people, such as ‘bahala na’ attitude. (See Huffington Post) Obviously, it builds on Captain Mendoza’s come-what-may, devil may care attitude in taking his personal issue to the level of the absurd. But it is not just the existential absurd specific to the Filipino psyche. Mr. Wagner, the author of the article commenting on the Filipino psyche in the wake of the hostage incident, has in effect expanded our specificity as an absurd psyche into the level of the historical. The world is watching us, and the world is expecting us to change.

Mr. Wagner also emphasized our propensity “to accept low common denominator of performance” as the most likely reason for our failure to demand of ourselves and the government, resulting in unpredictability, the irreducible essence of our psyche that no logic can qualify, vulnerable to be swept aside by the erratic tides of history, impressionable to the promptings of the absurd. Logic is of course a Western virtue. And logic makes the West a well-prepared society, that is, well-prepared to direct the course of history at the expense of the non-West. Here is a case of Wagner telling us in subtle ways that the price of earning our independence from the clutches of the dominant West is the lowliness of our cultural existence.

What I can say to Mr. Wagner is this: Hey, Mr. Sandman, have you lost touch of your own history? Do you have a Chinese flag at the bottom of your sea? Mr. Wagner must know for sure that the Chinese has long been dominating our local economy.

It is hypocritical of a learned and sensitive ordinary Filipino to say that he or she bears no grudge against the Chinese. Filipinos are not ignorant of reality. Let us tell that to Mr. Wagner. Mr. Wagner would be surprised that we are more than a civilized people in fact—we have allowed the plunder of our economy without raising an arm against any Chinese on a dramatic historical scale. We have learned to respect the juridical institutions that protect economic order, no matter how absurd it means most of the time. Though we as a people have not taken justice into our own hands in a massive historical scale, like the ethnic cleansing of Europe and Africa, we cannot guarantee that others in the future would not lose touch of reality.

Yes, it is a problem of our culture. But insofar as culture can only mature with the help of the schools, we can only appeal to Mr. Wagner and the Chinese people to be responsible and courageous enough to suppress (and I mean suppress in the strongest possible political terms) the propensity of their governments to take advantage of this nation of servants so that we can have something to spare for our cultural nourishment.

We need our economy back, plain and simple, and thereof, guarantee that if ever another hostage crisis happens again it will be in the next 300 years or so. Incidentally, it took just about that length of time for the West to discipline and sublimate its own evil tendencies. Three hundred years after: perhaps, it will be a police colonel, and another three hundred, a police general. Not bad, isn’t it Mr. Wagner?

Para kay Kim Tsu (Muli, Haring Bastos)

Madali lang patayin ang tulad mo kung hindi ka lang din tatahimik. Hindi mahirap ipikit ang mga mata at magdasal sa diyablo. Salamat sa diyablo, nauso ang mga dasal, tigib ang mga sumpa, hayok sa pagbabalbal ng mga salitang pag-ibig lang ang kayang umintindi. O, diyablo, diyos ng kahibangan! Diyos ng mga bigong puso… Para sa iyo ito. Kung hindi mo kilala kung sino ka manghiram ka ng pangalan—kalunos-lunos ang mamatay nang kahit hiram wala kang masumpungang anyo. “Ang sakit mong magsalita Gerald!” Umiiyak na tugon ng bakla sa matong kalaguyo.

Para kay Mariyel

Sinikap kong habulin ka sa daang alam ko, nagkataon namang tinangay ka ng palipad-hangin ni Robin. Paano na ba? Paano na ang pelikula? Paano kita gagawan ng pelikula?

Sinikap kong mapansin mo ang mga dalit na inalay sa gagambang turista. Wala akong mapaghalawan ng piyesa nuon, isang taon na ang nakaraan. Isang araw, naisip ko ano kaya kung tunay kang gagamba, at may sapot kang inipon sa puson—magpaparaya ka ba sa anyaya ng alitaptap na naghahanap ng masusumpungang lagim?

Batid kong minsan sinto-sinto ka kaya magpapaliwanag na lang ako nang maikli: “Hindi ito para sa iyo. Turista ka ba? Lalong hindi ka gagamba!”

On condoms and terrorism

One fine day in the year of the Lord, faith becomes the sole privilege of  sacred religion. Faith has become an independent reality, but lest it is wrongly discerned as a cold detached structure of existence its autonomy must be saved from its undecided appearance. Humans don’t simply want a reality that at the outset they cannot control, though they will settle for something like a metaphysical comfort to govern them before the day is through. To the organized consciousness of religion, whether it is autonomous or co-extensive with persons in its essence, what matters is that faith is understood as a mystery that life continues to offer. No longer inaccessible by any human appropriation as saddened the priests of the bygone ages, faith acquires the recognition that it is a source of awe, inspiration, wonder, and the most banal of all, worship and obedience which by all accounts are the ends for which any religion of the sacred claims faith to be its privileged birthright.  With respect to obedience, the practical logic of faith becomes even more suspect than it does for initiating the work of wisdom which it also claims to counter: obedience always implies the handcraft of power.

And here comes Celdran shouting at the top of his lungs in the middle of a mass, decrying the clergy’s stand on contraception. Celdran must have correctly imagined himself representing the only intelligent choice over the right to decide on family reproduction. But, he must not affront faith, so he was told. He must not affront life. No doubt, the handcrafts of anti-reproductive health bill are made synonymous to an enabling attitude toward life, pro-life, so to speak.  That is where faith is brandished as an issue of life. Of life—it says that family reproduction is a breach of our covenant with God who is the source of life. It sounds linguistically tricky. ‘Of’, among others, suggests a function word used to indicate a point of reckoning, and to reckon is to determine something by reference to a fixed basis. We need not belabor the point. The idée fixe of the Catholic clergy is that God wants us to multiply.

Proponents of family planning contend otherwise–it must rather be an issue for life, human life in particular. For life—they contend that life is an open region of negotiations where the best possible solutions must be brought in place. ‘For’ is used here to indicate a purpose, an active, inventive and predictive human plan. As a purposive counterplan to arrest the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and population explosion, reproductive health seeks to accord human life a rational purpose. By all means, this is a unique expression of faith in the  rational future of humanity. Thrown into the hands of chance and the vagaries of interhuman activity, human life appears without any reason or purpose at all. But it is human life that actually takes control of things which gives life a purpose and a meaning. Life has no purpose beyond what we can offer to it. Life is bare and indefinite, whereas human life is roofed, sheltered, protected, and shielded, definite as far as it proceeds with a direction and goal in mind. But since human life is for the most part just about the opposite of a roofed, sheltered, protected, and shielded condition of existence, thanks, among others, to the immense wealth of the clergy which it doesn’t want to redistribute to the poor and has remained divinely off limits to taxation, it is time to become more purposive, active, inventive, and predictive. We mean ‘more’ as the more of a purpose-driven life which consigns the future of a roof, a home, a school, a community to the infallible fictions of a naturally ordered universe.

We are either for or against life, the preservation of the open region, the contingency it secures for the fallible exercise of human freedom (all the more that discretion is required which is an unmistakable human virtue) or the termination of this region in favor of a lie that we are a helpless bunch of species forever dependent on the vagaries of revealed wisdom in which God chooses to disclose his will and true intentions. The crux of the matter is that some men would have to relinquish the belief in His total mystery in favor of an active interpretation of His will, whether it is His will or not, who knows which is which, before the real work of eternity sets which to all appearances will favor surrendering our future to the vagaries of chance.

…

It took Celdran and the courage in his chest to jolt the clergy out of its historical complacency. It is a complacency that has defined the long history of clerical interference on the conduct of our governance. It is the complacency, backed up by power and wealth, which has made this bunch of moralists the biggest political mistake we continue to bear as a struggling people since Christianity set foot in Mindanao which is now a major Muslim stronghold.

Celdran’s protest over the CBCP’s stand against reproductive choice was viewed, among others, as an attack on his eminence Archbishop Cardinal Rosales who was then officiating an ecumenical mass at the Manila Cathedral, short of an outrage against the infallibility of the highest and most powerful cleric in the world who is an official resident of Vatican. More than anything, however, it was considered an outrage against faith, an unacceptable slur against life.

Lucky for Celdran, the age of Inquisition is over. He would have risked the stakes for his stunt. But if Celdran was lucky, the Catholic Church is luckier. Thank goodness he pulled a Rizalian stunt. Celdran wanted a condom in place of a full emancipation from the moral and political bankruptcy of established religions. Rizal wanted a change of guards in place of a more desirable change of our historical destiny. Thank goodness it was not Bin Laden who disturbed an infidel’s mass—a religious fanatic (hated by learned, compassionate and true Muslims around the world) who believes he has the most faithful and truthful intention to use the Koran to disturb anything close to making an exception to the rule of his true religion. Unfortunately, we can bet that Bin Laden is also an advocate of pro-life by the common standards of the debate on contraception. To his followers, Bin Laden is the most credible champion of moral conservatism. And what have we in the final analysis?

This makes the Catholic hierarchy the luckiest, safe and secure from the terrorism of condoms, of the milf’s and pov’s in this time of the absence of a real god.

from the Gift of the Presidency, excerpts

One day, my office assistant, Marlon Elle, asked me if I ever tried my shadow feet on the then recently constructed ‘bay walk’—another new facility inside the campus—facing the infamous Pandacan Oil Depot. I said to him I tried them on a much familiar ‘bay walk’ along Roxas Boulevard, formerly Dewey Boulevard holding off the Manila Bay where my father first taught me how to swim. That was when it had salt water that tasted salt. I wonder what it tastes like now.

Marlon told me that though it couldn’t match the bay walk that I know, at least the campus bay walk shares a common feature with the real McCoy—they are both unfortunate in terms of having to hold out the stench of their aquatic host.

If I like the sunset view along the Manila bay walk, I might find something at least similar to a creative epiphany of the sublime if I stick around the campus bay walk and wait for Rainier Maria Rilke’s angels to whisper in my ears ‘something’ to write about. Make no mistake. The breeze must smell bad. But I hate poetry written under the pretext that the Muses could only whisper to your ears when the breeze smells fantastically good. If poetry is finicky about the right place to get oneself inspired by the Muses, what about the beat poetry of Ginsberg and Kerouac? Poetry doesn’t say a bay walk should have a river by its side like the river of Lethe where one forgets how to make poetry. The trick is on the river itself. The river is so good you can forget about poetry. But there is poetry. And the river must always smell something.

That day I smelled something by the river below the ramparts. I guessed if the campus bay walk had a poetic power other than its physical use in holding off the river tide, it is this—a short tale was conveyed by the unclean winds. It was a plot to assassinate the president.

(Copyright 2010, Manila, Philippines)

Musings

‘A Figure in the Distance’

It was a long time I guess since the last we met. He had grown his beard quite thick to the degree that it looked his best so far, besides the fact that I knew how he desired to grow his beard unkempt. That was the last time we talked about before he reappeared in the landscape of my memory.  His name is Diego. I saw him somehow, but I didn’t see him in his physical presence. He crossed my mind, without rhyme or reason. What is he doing these days? How old is his child now?

My eyes were busy trying out the various titles on a bookstand at the lobby of Shopwise at Commonwealth while my wife was cramming for groceries inside the department store. I was carrying my nine-month old boy and we did a tandem on the titles and colorful frontispieces which caught my attention. We almost had to say Eureka! together, a twosome of eager expressions when I caught sight of ‘The Figure in the Distance’. My son was uttering something in a slow preoccupied manner as he scrambled his soft hands on the cover. It’s a biographical novel, one of my favorite reads these days. That figure is a father. The author is a son paying homage to his old man. I wondered what distance would mean, but I quickly played up the thought that there ought to be a distance between a father and a son.

He must have likened the sable gloss of the cover with a picture of an old bespectacled man framed in a thin line forming a figure of a box . I caught his eyes in their curious attention fixed on the jacket. He went on mussitating something only he knew. And then he looked up at me as his lips were starting to form a round delicate ingress of a speech-cave. I felt something in my chest, increasingly throbbing in a thoughtless carnival of patchy rhythms as he was uttering something to me. I imagined him asking me if it’s ok to remember me when I’m really gone. In the meantime, we can enjoy each other’s company without the need to fill in any gap. We can look at each other, eye to eye as we usually do. Then he would beam his sweetest and his daintiest, and I would clench my teeth to suppress my rather bizarre excitement to swallow this spotless, naïve, pure, innocuous dearest of my life. But I would only manage to plant a smooch on his fresh milk-scented cheeks.

At the back of my mind, I was listening to myself as I whispered a battered philosophic tune. I was telling myself what I was telling my students the other day. Indeed, it is ironic to find real happiness when one is perfectly oblivious to the fluctuation of one’s moods. The opposite—pain, grief, sorrow, and a deep sense of loss—is  rather occasioned by a thoughtful conquest of a disposition bordering on insomnia. A mindful occupation in this sense can only indicate that somehow time has stopped, and a void has conquered a space, enough to disorient happiness, snatch the bliss from the rapture that had borne it.

But, perhaps, I was really remembering my dead father in this tricky mood, at a distance from the border of the unknown where the sands flow like water before the water melts into an infinite dry space. Strange as it was, I put the book back on the stand with the back cover facing the on-looker. The figure in the distance was then a figure in the dark converse of another world where I suppose it wouldn’t disturb a soul anymore…

About Diego. He was my college best friend. I ask myself where he is now. It is a distance that one cannot measure if only to say that I don’t have any idea where he  could possibly be.  What I know with certainty is that our parental obligations have all but required us to avoid contact with our impressionable ghosts as much as possible as the youths we once were, carefree and audacious with a penchant for irreversible mistakes, and what have you.

That distance also allows us to drift along our own lives, freely succumbing to the moral imperative of raising a child so that the future can abide as a future, so that it can have an unbroken stash of humanity forever an appreciative slave to its randomness, its promise of spontaneity, of combusting the energies of creation as the supply lasts. Indeed, the future owes a lot to those who had walked out on their ghosts that used to question the necessity of this metaphysical bondage to the unknown but are now fornicating with the concrete probabilities of infinity.

And then I realize how it is almost impossible to be a father if what some people say is true—that the child or the youth in us shall never perish of the hands of time. October 3, 2010

Para kay Shalahlahnepenoy

(Muli, Haring Bastos)

Tumatayo ang balahibo ko.
Isa ka ngang aswang.

Malayo nga kung ganun ang agwat natin.
Ako, buhay na patay. Ikaw, patay-patayan.

‘Wag sana muling pagtagpuin.
Isa ang magigising:

Kung hindi sa rurok ng mahabang puyatan
Tama!
Sa dilat na tumbong ng estatwang sugatan.

Sapat na ang ganito.
Masarap ang ganito.
Ikaw, ako, tayong hindi naging dalawa.

Laging tig-isa.

Tig-isang banig.
Tig-isang pikit.
Tig-isang dukit.
Tig-isang tiis.

Hayan, tumatayo na.

November 8, 2010

It’s hardly Christmas.What gives?

I could be anywhere with my one year old son and my wife where the holiday herd is—the shopping malls, for the most part where Christmas has found a permanent home, tucked away from its traditional haven, the family living room, the kitchen, or the garden, etc., or, if anything, the homely heart where the cardiac spirit of Christmas is kept, breathing secretly, palpitating with life that refuses to comply with the absurd requirements of getting along with the rest tuning in with the common musicality of the season. But I am here facing my laptop monitor, tinkering with the keys, while my son is soundlessly asleep, dreaming of jingle bells, and my wife making noise on the keyboard at her work station, somewhere where Christmas is.

Where Christmas is, there it’s supposed to be perfectly Christmas. Christmas is everywhere—on the TV, on radio, over the internet, on smart phones and tech gadgets which make Christmas all over the place where you can bring the media and where media come in handy. These extensions of human sensory organs dictate the mood. Once you get into the groove, you feel the magic spell of the season. The trick is on the mood, which is a general feeling of a group. It’s a holdover of our past life as part of a herd, the mentality develops in the subterranean channels of the unconscious and as hardly detectable as their nature is they build up without notice. The group sense reasserts itself especially when there is a general lack of sense, in other words, the dissolution of meanings, the vanishing of values that are thinning in the air as the air gets thicker with high carbon values, the herd taking over the ramparts of individual autonomy. It’s even worse than could be expected because individual autonomy can’t be trusted anymore as it were centuries ago though we should not expect an autonomy that was practiced there something to our liking, given our modern sophisticated taste and sensibility. Individual autonomy is a herd in disguise, if not a herd that loathes itself for being so. Everyone wants to get in the groove of freedom; everyone becomes free to shatter the herd which the family, charged with preserving enabling traditions of the past, mostly represents. It’s the youth generation, or the sibling generation (the fifteeners to thirty five something ) in Robert Bly’s apt description of the new society taking place inspired by the new technological revolution, bringing Christmas to the malls, to the internet, to the virtuality regions of human happiness away from the strictures of actual reality and the obligations that they translate to.

Indeed, humans as humans, sans the modern tools of convenience which are fast becoming artificial for the needs of a decaying humanity, have become perfectly incapable of feeling through their own senses, let alone reasonably dictate their own moods without the need to depend solely on outside stimuli which have turned human moods into veritable items of consumption. But hope springs eternal. There is a silent lot among humankind that wishes to stand outside this time of gift-giving where the gift is commonly taken as the rush of moods to get along with everybody. (The meaning of the Greek term ekstasis, that is, to stand outside, is kept in mind here). Their silence is a refusal to participate in this season; a passive activism of thought where thought means the true source of giving. If thought is that source, then thought gives. Thought is the one that really gives. Thoughtfulness: a thought that gives in silence. Thought is the heart that gives, the mind that gives time to give. But that time is not yet.

Nevertheless, we have been hankering for thought though for the most part overwhelmed by the playful satiation of our desires  in the virtual landscape, which reinforces obliviousness (it takes our time to reckon away from a necessary mindful occupation of a mood). Just for how long we have been yearning for the thought that gives, and since when,  we may not have a chance to completely discover. It is perhaps buried in the untold past of humanity that myths and folktales can only secretly whisper. And they whisper a secret that even they do not assume to be true. They have a lot of respect for the integrity of the past, its silence, its mystery. But our technologies do. They turn our myths and folktales into blockbuster cinemas.

Our being captive to the technological media of modern times tells exactly how this secret is being communicated and shared today. The secret is thought should give way to more practical concerns and we have been doing exactly the right thing. We have been accommodating the call of the times in terms of giving in to the temptation of earning an individual place for autonomous expressions away from home where home represents the sluggishness of the pre-technological past, the naivety of old norms, or the traditionalism of the dining area, the sense of belongingness that the living room offers, and the aesthetic learning that the kitchen affords our culinary minds to segue into the subtle innuendos of mixing, of blending, of harmonizing, of sautéing, of warming the food with just the right amount of fire, etc, anticipating the real art work that is about to unfold in later life. We would rather express individual autonomy in the public sphere, the region of freedom and presumably of happiness; of an “I” that claims a space in the symbolic order, the sociality sphere. But since it is symbolic a claimed space for and in behalf of freedom will always elude its actual referent. It does not want a referent, in the first place. Instead, it desires a form of happiness that homes can’t take away, a taste of freedom that the kitchen can’t match, a sense of autonomy that the dining area discourages.

The time to eat is a time for communal bonding. The food, though it serves a nutritional purpose, would here actually serve an aesthetic underpinning, a spiritual sense of belongingness as part of the humanity of the gifted—gifted with blessings that are for the most part the actual labor of others: our individual part on our own success will not be possible without a network of others doing their share. The time to eat is thus the time to accommodate the other, others into the dining room, give thanks to them for the gifts they bestow on our table. But the fast-food chains have overtaken this spirit.

Why is it that it’s hardly Christmas despite the successful saturation of our imaginative landscape by the technological media of today which create everything from Christmas to Christmas, meaning, everything from real to real?

But where Christmas is Christmas, where it is happening, there Christmas does not claim a recognizable space, a recognizable time, there it’s Christmas like no other. It’s Christmas in between-space of gift-giving, in between-time of the season of giving. Where you can’t figure out today when Christmas is, there you know what Christmas means, that is, in the time beyond here and today. In the time of a wonderful thought, a thought that gives us the Christmas time of the future within the margins of the here and today. Then, it’s happy christmas all year round.

…

I’m calling my wife to ask her to take an early leave today. I would have texted but no I preferred to call, the human voice taking my mood to the auditory canal of a human hearer who can voice back, the hearer only pausing to accommodate a heart’s voice expressing the plea for ekstasis, a petition to relinquish our false love for an artificial humanity that has virtualized the workplace as the home where it thinks the home should be.  It’s an exchange of life, life as it is actually lived.

Imagine This

Imagine this: we pause to pause for the absolute experience of time where lies the secret of all.

If we pause for a while, and assume that by allowing a moment of void to let itself be experienced, which already indicates that a void is not a void—it can be experienced one way or another—we are pausing to think in order to accommodate a void, such as the voidal moment of thinking in and through a recess, are we then assuming that a ‘pause’ is an actual pause, in which case an actual thinking-pause? If I say that I paused already, here and now…would you mind the pause or ignore what comes next after the ellipsis? Would you believe me? Would you believe me when I said that I paused already, and it is entirely up to you to believe whether I did pause or not?

Or, is it entirely up to me to convince you that I did pause? Do I need to declare a secret? That I barely remember when I did pause. But I have to believe that you know that for me to begin writing the first word of this paragraph, a pause must precede me…

A void must have been there already.
It’s not entirely up to me.
That seems obvious now.

But not so obvious as to see it without seeing it which is what ‘obvious’ means in the absolute sense. You don’t need to mind it; you don’t need to look at it; you don’t have to see it, in which case the ‘nothing’ is the most obvious case. Nevertheless, our minds are not accustomed to see just that—to see nothing in its most obvious sense. Imagine this: you can’t see my pause even if I did pause. You can’t allow the thought that what I have written so far are pauses that pause, pauses that make possible a continuity which is a more refined name for a breather. To pause is to take time. And there’s the ultimate paradox: time is nothing to be seen.

It’s not in your timepiece, digital or analog. It’s there but not there. It’s here but not here. It’s unassumable except for time’s mysterious founding of itself. I don’t suppose you to be an unbeliever of time. No one (alive, that is a living human) is capable of disbelief in time. But even the dead have it, and they have it in the most perfect way of having it, that is, absolutely as an eternal possession. Only the dead can possess time. They alone can have time in the most accomplished sense, that is to say, unrepeatable, unique, irreversible.

In any case, time still functions as a bridge between the living and the dead. Without time, there would be no dead, the dead that constitutes the utmost possibility of life that in life pauses for the dead. The dead do not pause for us for they could not pause in the sense of preparing to make a motion: to pause is to be in a situation of capability, and capability is life’s wanting to achieve a pause.(Life without pause is reserved for the gods whose lack of economy does not deserve the envy of the human). The dead could not take time for time has owned them absolutely, in which case we, the living, have not been owned yet. It is always up to us to mind time, to take time, and to make time for life, that is to say, to pause for the dead that alone knows the secret of time.

And yet, time does not mind.
It does not have a mind for it to learn to pause.
There is nothing that prevents time to be the envy of being. Time not ‘god’ is the envy of Man.

But ‘God’—where are you hiding?
The question can only come after a pause.
After a pause comes the decision to ignore what one had found, such as a secret.

Is Tchaikovsky Chinese?

www.nzwide.com/swanlake.htm (go to site)

Some people, including my former feminist-comrades, may not like the idea of Swan Lake that China has choreographed to such an un-Tchaikovskyian taste, or so it must have appeared to them.

…

If Tchaikovsky had an original choreographic vision of Swan Lake to the extent that all non-Russian choreographies of Swan Lake are revisions of his musical originality, and if, arguing by the structural provenance of everything from which this Tchaikovskyian thing emanates, if we can put it that way, then everything is a simulation. But simulation is ‘everything Chinese’, not only in the sense of the rhetorical. Simulation has become historic by the rise of China. What could be more perfectly intriguing is this: We have been copying China, including its Tchaikovsky. This also applies to global capitalism. Everything is Chinese. Even ‘nothing’ is Chinese. Is this not the logic of simulation that China has mastered in terms of mastering capitalism? And it has mastered capitalism by mastering its opposite, by simulating its opposite, socialism. Nonetheless, it is simulating no less than ‘itself’. Which means to say: It is ‘godding’ itself. All other global capitalisms are inferior to the Chinese mastery of simulation, its divine way of doing political economy, or more correctly, of telling the world that Tchaikovsky was Chinese.

Why the philosophical is always the political? Or, why philosophy is impossible?

 

To he who doubts philosophy’s relevance to political struggle

 

On the one hand, its early beginnings proved that philosophy is a political enterprise. A challenge to the polis’s culture of moneymaking and housekeeping which as Socrates lamented in the Republic was responsible for the unjust charge against philosophy—that it is useless. On the other hand, as love of wisdom, philosophia demands the impossible against the order of the possible, the polis.

Philosophy understood love as the act of the impossible itself. That is, love based on the ultimate structure of reality known to the ancients, that the human condition is non-reciprocal in nature. Reality is through and through a negotiated sphere, constructed, fabricated, to say the least, a make-believe reality that alone constitutes the condition of possibility of dwelling in it. We are thus the creators of reality. Tat Tvam Asi.  Nevertheless, this is the reason why philosophy advocates justice. The non-reciprocity of the human condition makes our reality more prone to fallenness, to a more oblivious sense of inauthenticity, such as imagining a human condition in which reciprocity can at last be fulfilled. Throughout known histories, this fantasy has generated violence in proportion to the absolute elusiveness of its goal.

Philosophy advocates justice when clearly justice is absent within the human condition. When philosophy aspires for justice there philosophy pursues the impossible. Philosophy itself is the pursuit of the impossible. But the impossible is not really impossible. To paraphrase Derrida, the impossible is the more of the possible; it is more possible than the possible itself. This ‘more’ is what actually determines existence, and yet this ‘more’, this impossible continues to be unrecognized. It determines existence as the quiet power of actuality, to expand on Heidegger’s more original conception of the quiet power of the possible. Philosophy is this quiet power of actuality. Philosophy is actuality itself.

And yet, what makes it more actual is that philosophy thrives in the most impossible, because freest act of all human acts, love. What could be ‘more actual’ than that which is freest? But better if it is, to quote Pascal which Levinas is fond of quoting, love without concupiscence, without lust, without desire (in the common sense meaning of desire as an economy, a distribution and/or exchange of the primal forces of the instincts, which makes love unmistakably related to exchange economy). It is love without the attributes of human non-reciprocity, such as between a man and a woman whose physical attributes and subject-positionalities in terms of desiring are different and varied. It is love without asking in return in contrast to asking a return gesture such as the love that asks a return gesture in today’s exchange economy, perfected in marriage: when a man says I do, he expects the woman to say the same in the exchange of vows, a mutual exchange. The love that philosophy advocates is not mutual; it cares less if it gives love without a return gesture. It is a non-human love in the sense that it tries to transcend the limitations of the human. It is a godly form of love, the godly as the perfection of the human into the non-human. In the words of Nietzsche: To become what you are not. That is to say, to be free.

But philosophy is not naive. It knows too well that there are realistic impossibilities imposed on its exercise of free thinking, an exercise in creation. In this sense the ‘impossible’ acquires a different meaning. The imposible is less possible to make. Plato once lamented: “I have discovered the father of the universe, but I cannot declare it to everyone.” The ‘father of the universe’ is Plato’s allusion to the philosophic discovery of the secret of all, namely, that the impossible is more possible than the possible, that we are more possible than the gods. But it is within the margins that the impossible freely lives. It is within the margins of love, of desire, of faith, of religion, of politics, of knowledge, of art,; within the margins of the self, the ego, the I, the subject, the intention, the will to power; within the margins of the present and presence; within the margins of the here and now, which is the future itself, that the impossible is at its most possible. Even the future from where the impossible announces itself, from where the possibility of justice voices its concern, happens right now, but within the margins of the present.

Since its earliest beginnings, philosophy has always been the political if we mean the political as the problematization of the concept of justice, its possibility, its future. Nevertheless, the political does not mean the most resonant voice of expressing dissent and resistance. The political is the gradual, ekstatic transformation of the realm of human existence that is by far the most open toward change, namely, that realm of existence least polluted by the present . That realm is thought: thought as ex-posing, ek-sistent ek-sistence. Ekstasis, standing-apart or outside. In Plato’s works, that realm is the inner self, which explains the founding political gesture of all: “Know Thyself.”

Lastly, philosophy thrives on friendship where the real test of justice is played out. Friendship is one impossible act of violating the ultimate structure of reality, that humans are non-reciprocal, without actually violating it. It preserves that ultimacy but in abiding care such that friendship preserves non-reciprocity in the freest sense possible. The test of justice, the test of virtue itself lies in this: to love a friend who is not related to you by blood, he or she who is related to you by the sheer accidence of encounter, by the contingent arrangement of time and space such as your neighbour—the other can also be someone who does not share your opinions, whoever he or she is. To love a friend is to love the wisdom of the impossible. And to love the wisdom of the impossible is to be free. To be free is the utter sex of the impossible, if sex is still necessary to the impossible.

To be free is to become what one is not. To become like death itself without actually dying. To die without actually dying is to give to the other what you are not, in which case death is not he or she who gives. Death is not yet he or she who gives, and who gives without asking a return gesture, even if the gesture is the most desirable: an equal exchange between two deaths. This is the gift of death, as Derrida expanded in his essay of the same title. The one who gives: better if he or she is not he or she to himself or herself. The one who gives: better if he or she is not yet death himself or herself, for death terminates the actuality of the giving. It is in giving where death is annulled, its finiteness canceled in favor of the infinity of the gift itself—life!

This would have been the perfect flip side to Hamlet’s lament—O cursed spite, that I was born to set it right! That would have been also Plato’s unheard of verse: That we are all infinite, eternal, gods. Need we stress it—gods don’t die!

But if it is the case that we are not gods, then we can only be ghosts. Ghosts are the eternal summation of the immanent infinity of human freedom. They never rest.

 

Para kay Mubarak

Kapos na ang hininga mo
Humihirit ka pa.
Ipinaglihi ka talaga sa amoy ng Clorox.
Bakit hindi? Nagawa mo pang mag-isip:
“Bahala na, ‘pag tumayo nang testigo,
Kay Susan tayo!”

Message from Loyola

From Mother, To Son

I grieve for you, son, the little boy who used to be innocent. I grieve for you now, even more, for you wouldn’t let me grieve with dignity.

I am not happy being here. Mothers don’t love repose. We yearn for life, for the infinite chance to tend to children—they who persist in the vision of eternity that humans dream of. That was how it was in the beginning, in the thousands of pasts from which we woke up, like a journey from grave to grave, wherefrom each end, a child beams, reaches out his frail hands to touch the wind.

Yet, even from this grave I yearn to be your mother once more. I would have traded death–this tranquility that is the envy of every living soul that struggles to make both ends meet–or, these many solitary chambers I have spent time at as a ghost capering from rest to rest, dreaming of life freely, of activity, of joy in sadness, of love letters scampering like dried leaves that refuse to land, of going back to motion that is full of consequences for the living if only the living knows where to train his eyes on, yes, for a chance to make you a child once more, knowing that it would make of me, once again, a slave of chance.

For I want to grieve with the quietness that bare life deserves. But even in grave I can still wonder: Why can’t these images that had blinded you, and every man I knew, deserve death more than every child’s innocence?

Now, I grieve over your lost innocence that you had learned to trade so skillfully for honor and dignity that I sometimes marveled what had come of it—this preponderance of cunning self-images that you took as your own!

Pride, wealth, power.

But, oh, how can I grieve?

Leftism and the Khadafi hang over, or why a no-fly zone is needed at this point?

Part 2 (in progress)

As of this writing, the Arab league has initiated the call for UN to impose a no-fly zone over Libya’s airspace. We should look at this development from two standpoints: 1) the Arab league is an important ally of the US and the West whose recent initiative will certainly create the impression that global powers, if they decided to act on it, are not acting unilaterally or without regard to the regional autonomy of the Arab region (which of course is not true: the Arab league is a crucial regional buffer of imperial powers to protect their strategic interests), and 2) the longer these powers take their time to decide, the tactical purpose of a no-fly zone earlier appealed by the rebels stands to lose its real aim. Imperial powers, and this time the Arab league are hoping to dig out solutions to quell if not render irrelevant and hopeless the wave of protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. In a nutshell, if these indications are successfully brought to conclusion—such as the dismantling of Khadafi’s military defenses at a later phase of the revolt—the US and the West, with the crucial concurrence of the Arab league are hoping that the appetite for protests will abate soon. It must be noted here that most of the individual representatives of the Arab league are the targets of massive demonstrations that call for an end to dictatorship and autocracy. In a sense they are playing the card of supporting the rebellion in Libya which was earlier ignited by the Arab spring that started in Tunisia and Egypt. These heads of states are holding their cards close to their chest but their tricks are obvious. They are hoping that by supporting the rebellion they will be excused from the protests.

It becomes obvious now why an immediate response to the appeal by the rebels for a no-fly zone was not on the immediate tactical agenda of the US and the West. If earlier they had made it public that the option was not off the table, it was clearly meant to scare Khadafi to stop the brutal offensives for which global powers have been under pressure to provide immediate solutions. The fiercer Khadafi responds to the revolts the limited the options for Western powers and the US to maneuver the Arab spring. It counts however as a strategic agenda with time delay as a critical component. The no-fly zone would therefore become a course of actions for global powers if and only if it will decisively put an end not only to Khadafi’s rule but also, and much more importantly, to the Arab spring. It can also give opportunity for imperial powers to utilize its military presence for better control of oil in the immediate future.  In short, the rebellion must be the one politically dictating the terms of the no-fly zone. If global powers do not agree to the limited terms of military interference, the rebellion can elevate the struggle into a liberation movement.  There is no reason for the rest of the Arab spring not to support this movement by spreading more fires of rebellion and protests. This time the reluctance of global powers to agree and settle politically with the terms of limited military intervention can be easily construed as support for Khadafi and the autocrats of the Middle East and North Africa.

The US and the West are capitalizing on a UN Security Council concurrence, which is not going to happen in the immediate time possible, with threats of veto by Russia and possibly China. The rebels’ appeal for a no-fly zone is therefore meant to provide the international community with facts on the ground, and that as this stage of their struggle it seems very unlikely that Khadafi will be defeated militarily.  The appeal is also addressed to the Arab spring—that the struggle of the Libyan people has acquired a new twist.

In short, what we are seeing right now, and with this recent development, is the gradual effort to utilize Libya’s crisis to discredit the Arab revolts. Nevertheless, it is also crucial for the Arab spring to support the rebellion in Libya. If the Arab league has announced its support for a no-fly zone with sinister motives, it is time for the leaders of the Arab spring to seize the moment and promote the political terms of the no-fly zone  and expose the agenda of the Arab league at the same time. In this sense let the imperial powers know that the people’s movements across the region are the ones in charge not their governments, nor their heads of states. The Arab uprising must also add to its growing political valence the assertion that any prolonged military presence of imperial powers needed only at this point is unacceptable beyond toppling Khadafi. It must be made clear that Khadafi must go. His prognosis that foreign intervention will spark a new Arab uprising with anti-colonial sentiment is obviously a useless blackmail. Khadafi would have been excused from the uprising had he not been a useful ally of Western powers in his own capacity to negotiate with these powers his family’s security and wealth in four decades of autocratic rule. The longer he stays the longer the imperial powers can negotiate with time to maneuver the direction of the Arab uprisings. Obviously, at this stage of their struggle, Libya’s rebel forces must militarily defeat Khadafi, the last crucial blow to the dictatorship.  As I emphasized previously, the political merits of the rebellion have already been established—and the leaders of the rebellion, from a broad coalition of populist and leftist movements and organizations, know that these merits can be utilized to negotiate with the international community– but Khadafi himself, knowing he has no political valence to defeat the rebellion, shifted the terms of the battle into a military one where he enjoys a lot of maneuvering power that the West and the US helped him develop by lavish arms sales contracts.

Part 1

To be more specific, I am referring to some left intellectuals who oppose Western interference in the Libyan crisis. Their reasons are far from reasonable though. Despite the undeniable monstrosity of Khadafi’s handling of people’s unrest in his oil-rich North African dominion, some of this so-called left intelligentsia would rather drum up support for Khadafi for one simple reason—this lunatic had fed his people well with oil money. Feeding hungry people has been the battle cry of the traditional, orthodox left that continues to draw ideological inspiration from the failed socialist models of the last 20th century. The former USSR fed the Russian population but after reneging on its promise of political democracy —instead, the revolution created a new elite class—and its utter failure in terms of self-critique that Marx admonished the revolutionaries of his time to perform on themselves unmercifully and thoroughly, the first socialist model became a historic disaster. In Asia the grotesque transformation of socialist China into the second largest capitalist economy in the world today somehow proves that in the beginning the revolution was tailored to lay down the future foundations of state capitalism.

We contend that it is tactically sound to support Western interference, but on a politically restricted basis vis-à-vis the unacceptable guilelessness of some left intellectuals advocating support for Khadafi who once endeared himself to the leftist cause worldwide. This means: to engage the West while it is mulling military intervention in ways that the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have already taught us. Support for interference must be passionately accompanied by condemning the need for full-scale military intervention, which involves ground offensives, while Khadafi is killing his own people.

But first, we need to assess the capability of the international left to interfere in the crisis as a solid block. There is no such solid block. Within the left ‘all that is solid melts into thin air’. One molecular instance of this vaporizing act of the left is the support currently aired by oil-rich Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez for the dictator. Chavez’s statement is a sharp indictment of the motivation of Western powers, including the US to interfere in the upheaval, which is understandable for the economic and political future of socialism, that is to say, from a global perspective in terms of the impending geopolitical realignment of global economy in the wake of Khadafi’s downfall, at least, on the aspect of oil control, which by and large will influence the political valence of socialist rhetoric worldwide as Libya’s oil will certainly provide a fresh opportunity for the US and the West to stem the tide of economic crises hitting their respective homelands.

As a sympathizer of 21st century socialist paradigm I understand Chavez’s fear. Socialists may fear that imperial powers are out to steal the gains of the Arab uprisings. But Chavez also refused to see that the opposition to Khadafi has no interest so far in accommodating Western initiative for full-scale military intervention. The worst that Chavez should fear is the continuing military offensives by Khadafi against opposition forces, including civilian communities which may provoke a change of mind among the battle inexperienced and poorly equipped opposition. The fiercer Khadafi strangles the opposition with brutal military offensives the more likely Western intervention is imminent. Khadafi’s rant against Western intervention is thus self-prophesying: He is saving capitalism. The West is hoping to gain international support for an excuse to control Libya’s oil, and Khadafi is giving it in his stupidest gesture to play off the rebellion. In short, the problem is Khadafi and he should go. Forget the heartstrings, Mr. Chavez. It is not also a secret that Khadafi was once backed by the West and even by the state of Israel which according to recent reports has organized a contingent of African mercenaries to support Khadafi quell the rebellion. Before the revolts exploded in the streets of Tripoli, the Khadafi family went on a buying spree of major Western capital stocks using oil money, even opened the oil industry to Western firms. The much-vaunted nationalization of Libya’s oil industry, once spurred by the questionable socialist rhetoric of his ‘third way’ ideology, is already threatening the future of the Libyan people.

Second, we need to renounce the leftism that has pervaded the ideological and political discourse of old world socialism and is threatening to pervade the early phase of socialist discourse of the 21st century—one that Chavez so passionately advocates. This leftism is a holdover of the failed Stalinist (the former USSR) and Maoist (China) socialist regimes of the 20th century. The key to understanding this leftism and its morally contemptuous support of a dictator like Khadafi is the ubiquitous leftist fantasy of feeding the hungry and taking control of the destiny of the oppressed via the political justification of taking over their right to political democracy. The first is utterly dependent on the last: the masses have to be led first in order that they could have food on the table. And the trick goes on: the masses have to be indefinitely led, which means that political democracy can wait until the end of time. This leftist brand of looking down on the priority of political democracy is not only arguably true to Chavez—at least on personal terms (he likes to be known as a friend of Khadafi) but most accurately to various strands of the left in the world today that continues to be stymied by the vestigial influence of the political culture of 20th century leftism that Che Guevarra once decried.

Third, and the acquiescence for a guarded interference: A populist support for a limited Western intervention is all that the left can settle with at this point, given its political limitations and its global defensive tack borne of the failure of the leftism of the previous century that it has unwilling inherited. But it is not only the left that had failed in the previous century. The West is failing in many fronts, economically and politically. The option to support Western interference is not after all a political force majeure on the part of the left: the Western powers that the left can arguably support at this point are the very same powers that are slowly exhausting their combined political moral strength in terms of providing leadership and direction to humanity, all the more when they take this waning strength to the battlefields of Libya where anti-colonial sentiments can be utilized by Khadafi to maneuver a protracted stalemate and buy his time. In other words, support for limited Western intervention is supporting what the West can and ought to do at this point, that is, to impose a no-fly zone and nothing more.

The West is undeniably militarily prepared, and with US on its side to provide crucial military push to invade this North African country on the pretext of overthrowing Khadafi, it can unleash a decisive military force that will end the looming stalemate. Nevertheless, the question remains open: will US and NATO, especially US, risk being politically isolated in a region that is slowly coming of age in terms of charting its political direction beyond the traditional rhetoric, even beyond Islamism that has co-existed with dictatorship and autocracy that has stymied its political civilization for centuries? The answer depends on a lot of factors, not only on the sinister motive of the US and the West that is no longer news. But the US and the West also know that any military intervention risks strong reaction from popular movements in Egypt and Tunisia and may enliven Al Qaeda that has been recently isolated by the uprisings, which these global powers have no reason not to rejoice. In the same manner, the left has no reason not to celebrate the increasing isolation of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East.

Even so, the US is in a worst quandary: it will have to choose between its strategic alliance with Israel (which acts as a buffer against Iran) that favors the Khadafi regime over a possible democratic government to replace the 42 year old Libyan autocracy and supporting the rebellion. As of this writing, the West is divided over the urgency to recognize the Interim government set up by the opposition. All these indicate that the West and the US are seriously avoiding the decision point. High-level talks of a full-scale military intervention are  meant to scare Khadafi and if he does the West and the US will save a lot of trouble, including much precious government assets.  But while Khadafi is mulling his biggest military offensive to take back rebel territories, the prospect of a bloody military outcome will certainly force global powers to settle with something close to a military intervention. If the left still thinks it is morally and politically legitimate to support the people’s revolt, then it is not unreasonable to support a decisive campaign to reduce Khadafi’s strength to a mythical certitude, one that can win a war in his fictional world of kings and subjects. That means: support for a no-fly zone and nothing more.

Nevertheless, this decision may be taken up sooner, and a full-scale ground intervention is still not far-fetched, regardless of whether the left supports it or not. But it is better to support it, that is, the rebels’ appeal for a no-fly  zone. The freedom fighters of Libya know where support is coming if it comes via the political wings of the global call for solidarity. The left should trust that these freedom fighters know fully well the tactical options of winning a civil war. Besides, they have known Khadafi, along with disgraced autocrats of Egypt and Tunisia, to be a shadowy ally of Western interests in the region.

But the greater aspect of the left solidarity for the people’s uprising lies in its readiness to raise  a parallel voice that supports  the political sentiment of the freedom fighters of Libya who earlier appealed for a no-fly zone–that a full scale military intervention which involves ground offensives is unacceptable.

§

It is also worth noting here that if the Arab uprisings are anything to go by, their insurrectional success in overthrowing dictators and autocrats proves that non-leftism has triumphantly redefined the structural, linguistic, and political landscapes of left praxis and discourse.

And it has redefined such in the least leftist of the earth’s landscapes—in the Middle East where for leftism to take root has to take root by artificial means. We can say that the Arab Region, extending to North Africa, is demographically apathetic to secular ideology by virtue of its ingrained Islamic disdain of modernity and its historical suspicion of the West. Marxism is very much a Western commodity but so is Maoism that is now vying for inclusion in the global community of Western capitalism. Today what the Arabs understand is simple: freedom never rests. They have understood of late that freedom is the essence of political democracy that the leftisms of the 20th century have consigned to the whims of the politburo.

To Marx, Lenin and Mao

 

Da-sein is the possibility of Man to outgrow his necessary death as animal rationale, thus outgrows himself as a rational being that only aspires for the truth of truth at the expense of the awareness of its essential opposite in its essential sway, untruth. To reach this possibility, this Da-sein as his utmost possibility, Man must abide in the essential sway of truth, which requires him to accept, among others, the fact that he is not the starting point, that he sustains himself as Man only to the degree that he is incomplete, unfinished, that he knows nothing, that he is not, that he is Man only because Da-sein enjoins him, calls him (a reciprocation of the call, indeed, for Man also calls and seeks Da-sein) to participate in the “pure preservation and guardianship” of the truth of Being, that is, “if indeed understanding of being is what is still fundamental.”

As if abiding in the aura and tone of the unfinished conception of this historical possibility called Da-sein—that is, the Da-sein that is now raised as an essential possibility from the objective presence of this possibility in everydayness (which means to say also that Da-sein is properly raised into the phenomenological, into the analysis of Da-sein that has both ontic and ontological possibilities rather than the mere possibility of it being a being-in-the-world, which is always the starting point of the analysis on the same basis that it must be reached by awareness, otherwise it will remain unrecognized, taken for granted which all the more fuels the indifference of the everyday)—Heidegger insinuates the greater uncertainty, contingency and paradox involved in such expression ‘if indeed mindfulness is still considered necessary’! In any case it is a call to conscience.

Finally, that which calls this Da-sein in Man—so far Man’s figurative abidingness in the necessity of understanding being that is yet to be reached by the full essential swaying of truth attributable to stammering, hesitating, and indecision before the truth of Being, or the awareness that even nothing ‘is’—calls as a call for Being, that is, for the autonomous determination of awareness, a mode of free projection. Suffice it to say that this demand strikes at the heart of Da-sein’s conscience, that is, a conscience beleaguered by painful, often absurd choices.

Excerpts from Philosophy and the Continuing Quest for Being
Copyright 2010 (V. Rivas/ Ateneo De Manila University)

On Deleuze, Heidegger and the discourse of freedom: Letter to “Daddy”

Regarding your question as to the task of philosophy to construct and reconstruct concepts within the immanent condition of possibilities, it is true that philosophy, in Deleuzean terms, has that task. But juxtaposed to freedom, it is a task that even Deleuze avoided–despite his radicality he is still a part of the great Western tradition that, among others, has viewed freedom as non-problematic. It is within this self-constraint of Western philosophy that Deleuze launched his reconceptualization of difference as the immanent privilege of repetition to inaugurate itself (its different sameness) into history, in Western history, and that is to say also, into the logic of sense, of the Western sense.

But in a more specific sense of philosophical scholarship to which this ‘sense’ the West keeps returning, Kant’s discourse of the modern subject sealed philosophy from the philosophical discourse of freedom, which, by virtue of the limits of which it has been finally made aware, with the necessary propaedeutic provided by Descartes, and ironically crystallized in Hume, nonetheless allowed freedom  to roam in a foreign land, away from its primordial dwelling place, away from Being and into the unguided and often hedonistic celebration of the letters, of literature, of the theater, of the everyday. At some point, freedom has inured itself to a foreign space, and has of necessity–for it to survive, for freedom to maintain its own integrity as “the free”–settled itself freely there, in the there-ness of its isolation.

Still, philosophy could not completely do away with freedom. Philosophy, Western philosophy, that is, has allowed freedom to underwrite itself in the silent spaces, in the margins of philosophy. Call it a eulogy for freedom, a long eulogy though, as Nietzsche would have put it in terms of the immanent association of freedom with self-causation (God!), which is popularly transcribed in the phrase God is dead. In other words, this deicide is the long eulogy which philosophy celebrates, but celebrate it does in terms of subsidizing the discourse of freedom under new names and concepts. It is in this context that repetition is possible, and that repetition itself is the logic of freedom (now reconstituted by the name of ‘difference’–which means to say, freedom is differing, differentiation, otherwise the adventures of the self that differs itself, the solipsism acquiring a materiality in history as the history of subjectivity, of the subject pluralizing itself in the same (empiricism!). Under these conditions, freedom barely recognizes itself anymore.

Sartre was the only one who faced up to the incredible demands of philosophy to shun freedom, and yet Sartre, a product of Western thinking, in the final analysis only extended the conceptual possibilities of the thinking of freedom within the spaces provided by Western philosophic tradition itself. Since Nietzsche’s exposition of the lie of the subject, the lie of claiming a privileged standpoint (positive freedom), Western philosophy, shameful of its arbitrariness, of its nakedness in the face of the truth of all truths–that the subject is so wicked to claim a standpoint (Schelling’s argument) from which everything follows, history, etc. which is a lie to which humanity has been taught to relate in obliviousness, the oblivion of the immanent possibilities of godding oneself, an oblivion, needless to say, that serves the intention of power, has viewed freedom to be the culprit, the source of this shameful course of history. Sartre took that tradition to its letter and re-transcribed the possibilities of renewing freedom that owns up to that lie. Existence precedes essence is a classic retranscription of freedom as a possession that humanity must not be wary of, must not shy away from, if only to say that there is no possibility available for Man than to be free. We are condemned to be free–Sartre therefore betrayed, once again, the secret of the Western subject but this time it was a secret that the West could not afford to own up to, for the second time since Nietzsche whose philosophical tendencies, like it or not, helped the Western subject/s to take advantage of this secret to found a new history (Hitler and the rise of National Socialism). Unluckily for Sartre, his discourse on freedom proved too significant for non-Western thought, for the non-West whose freedom has been suppressed, and therefore it is only correct that freedom should be taken up ‘there’ as a possession, a seizure of power, to wrest power from the West that controlled the destiny of the freedom of the non-West. We are not surprised why  Sartre today is viewed in the West as an outsider–no one takes Sartre seriously anymore, and even, in the non-West whose freedom is now increasingly reunited with the Western tradition of oblivion whose most representative illustration perhaps would be Heidegger’s notion of the non-starting point of the starting point called Man. Well, we are not the starting point, so to speak.

Now, I mean a progressing now, which also means a now that can only be rhetorically invoked, is the great time of freedom if only to say that–and I am saying this as a troubled reader of Western philosophy, but better ‘troubled’ than indifferent, better a ‘reader’ than a scholar–freedom can reinvent itself away from its previous condition of possibility in the West. If Western history became possible as a hegemonic history by depriving the possibilities of the non-West to create a history, then it can make a sound hermeneutical case (the hermeneutic circle) to reorient the West to its origin, that is, its origin in the non-West, the origin of its freedom, the real condition of possibility of the historical subject. It is therefore not odd to build a case for this reorientation in terms of declaring that the West robbed us of our own philosophy and claimed it as its own.

Having said these, it is my claim and thus I claim that the real task of philosophy is to think more originally than the West, thus also more originally than philosophy (specifically, for my part and on behalf of my academic interest, more originally than Heidegger). But this cannot be achieved by positive overcoming, say, in terms of decoding within the auspices of scholarship the master language of the master called Heidegger, or what have you, rather by re-accomplishing Heidegger outside of the conditions of possibility that made him possible. Re-accomplishing: this means also that Heidegger, and all other great paragons of Western thinking, must be reoriented to the proper evilness of their possibilities, or more specifically, to the fundamental horizon of Western thinking in general since Aristotle, that is, the taking up of a necessary opposite (the non-historicality of the non-West) over against which it can claim to be free, free for thought, being, culture and, what a vicious circle, freedom!

On Levinas and, marginally, Zizek: Reply to E. Lazaro on “non-response”

“In his Ethics and Infinity, Levinas emphasizes how what appears as the most natural should become the most questionable-like Spinoza’s notion that every entity naturally strives for its self-perseverance, for the full assertion of its being and its immanent powers: Do I have (the right) to be? By insisting on being, do I deprive others of their place, do I ultimately kill them? (Although Levinas dismisses Freud as irrelevant for his radical ethical problematic, was Freud also in his own way not aware of it? Is “death drive” at its most elementary not the sabotaging of one’s own striving to be, to actualize one’s powers and potentials? And for that very reason, is not death drive the last support of ethics?)”

Neighbours and Other Monsters, A Plea for Ethical Violence – Slavoj Zizek

___________________

Well, four things:

1) I don’t trust Zizek’s understanding of Levinas. For all his ingenuity, his reading of Levinas is the lousiest.

2) Levinas’s call for non-response should be taken within the context of his Jewish-ness; in other words, Levinas is addressing the possibility of how a Jew can be un-Jew by realizing the ethicality of transcendence within the immanent possibility of freedom. Juxtaposed to Jewish religion under which a Jew acquires an identity, the ethicality of transcendence is not a possibility. A Jew should submit to God–it his the realization of his freedom. Levinas’s ethicality of transcendence demands more than that. It demands reaching out to the im-possible third person, to the person beyond the personalism of the relationship between “You and me,” between “I and the other,” which altogether constitute a second order relationship, a leap from the first-order relationship that the ‘I’ imagines itself capable of realizing, such as the I pluralizing itself into “Is”(many I). The third person is your neighbor, but your neighbor is only an other in a complicated network of others, humanity. To reach out to these others is the demand of justice, justice that represents the impossible third in the relationship between I and Them, between You and They. In other words, this demand of justice is a demand to transcend the empirical accidentalities of persons. Nevertheless, these empirical accidentalities (including one’s Jewishness) are what make persons persons. Phenomenologically put, we need to bracket these empirical accidentalities in order to come face to face with a person in all his or her nakedness, a nakedness that, reduced to its bareness, always demands to be attended to. Another way to put it is that these empirical accidentalities (power, wealth, fame, hence also, un-power, poverty, and obscurity) dress up the person in a way that empowers or falsely denudes him or her, the accidents glossing his or her ontological weakness. But these accidents constitute historical existence. Historical existence therefore demands to be attended to within the context that this existence is at bottom weak, thus, needing the ‘other’, the other who is as naked,  as weak as you and me. This weak ex-istence (not existence; ex-istence connotes here a capacity for mindful awareness of the condition of one’s existence and also of others’, which is, need we belabor the point here?-’weak’) that the individual human person ‘is’ should also be recognized by the other in himself or herself for the other to respond without presuppositions, phenomenologically speaking, to respond without the presupposition that one is doing it for the Good (which is the ultimate bias of self-certainty!) to the other.

3) This is the ultimate context within which we can understand the logicity of ‘non-response’. Non-response is after all a response aimed at the accidentality of a person. It is the other’s accidentality to which non-response responds. We therefore respond to non-accidentality, to the unhistorical, that is to say, to the possibility of justice. But what is justice? In the ultimate sense justice is the condition of the nonreciprocity of the human, which leads me to my last point–

4) In the nakedness of the other justice is confirmed–that persons in their fundamental bareness are nonreciprocal. This fundamental condition of our existence unfortunately is taken up in history as an opportunity to intend power, power to break the nonreciprocal condition of existence by arguing for reciprocity (which is the greatest utopian promise ever conceived by power). As history has shown reciprocity only worsens our condition, but it worsens it more to the extent that by denying our condition of existence in fundamental nonreciprocity our very nature is at stake. Reciprocity threatens to make the human condition extinct and lifeless.

Parting words:

Non-response is a response. A response that is possible only within the margins of historical existence. Does this mean our historical response is futile? NO.

Historical response may be qualified into a response that is silently self-accusatory, for one’s direct or indirect participation in the perpetuation of the problems for which a historical response is called . No one is excused from responsibility; indeed, the more remote one is from the causality of the problem, that is the less one is guilty (such as Zizek interrogating the guiltiness of Levinas dismissing Freud, notwithstanding that it is done with hesistance punctuated by insistent question marks, five all in all [?????]), the more responsibly he should act. By responsibility we mean the responsibility to not excuse oneself, that is, from the possibility of error, moral or epistemological, such as the ones I have claimed so far here.

One will notice that this already constitutes a response, albeit, an impossible one, thus a non-responsal, within historical existence.

Seinlassen: Farewell to Being (A Baccalaureate reply)

Seinlassen: letting be. Is this non-responsal? Does non-responsal question intentionality? Or, does it, contrary to expectations, celebrate intentionality in its most fundamental sense and genesis?

Does letting-be a letting of intentionality be in this originary significance? Did Levinas intend the sense of non-responsal in the same way Heidegger meant his sigetic openness to the mystery of Being whose truth, he concludes, is prior to ontology? Seinlassen, lest it would unnecessarily confuse you (obviously, ‘you’: see Reply to E. Lazaro)  more than what is acceptable in terms of the relation of Levinas to Heidegger, is strictly Heideggerian, therefore, foreign to Levinas’s conceptual schema.

Still, Seinlassen may also mean non-responsal in the Levinasian sense on the condition that we allow letting-be in its original Heideggerian connotation to cross over into the path that Levinas aimed to protect against an ontological interpretation of Being, which, ironically, shares with the Heideggerian sense of destruktion, of destructive retrieval of the history of Being, in terms of returning the question of Being to the questioning of intentionality. Levinas is certainly a member of the class of thinking, granting the heuristic value of this conditionality apropos of a questionable intimacy with the Heideggerian Seinlassen, that questions the historical status of intentionality whose metaphysics Nietzsche had earlier exposed in his critique of Man’s will to truth. But Levinas’s own critique of intentionality is ultimately designed to rescue intentionality from the metaphysics of subjectivity. This, however, does not separate him from Heidegger whose fundamental ontology aims at returning our understanding (Verstehen) of Being to its proper sense, that is, a sense in which intentionality no longer holds the key to ontological deliberation, rather a sigetic releasement, an openness to the mystery of the origin, hence, Heidegger’s (though less popular) expression (in Contributions to Philosophy) that Man “is not the starting point.” Granting the expression—does this mean the non-starting point of intentionality?

It is worth asking which intentionality? What is the nature of this intentionality? Certainly, it is Man’s and it is the historicality that has characterized the fate of intentionality. It is this historicality that Heidegger pitted Seinlassen against, that is, the history of Being that has been understood to be the horizon of subjectivity in action, of freedom in a progressive course of self-realization, of intentionality, of the will to power. Heidegger underscored the oblivious nature of this history in terms of exposing how, in the horizon of freedom and subjectivity, the essence of Being is assumed by the subject such that Being becomes reducible to value-positing (a Nietzschean theme which Heidegger obviously improved). In contrast to this history, Heidegger proposed a return adventure to the mystery of the origin, this time not through philosophizing but through poeticizing (ein Dichten). In the final analysis, the Heideggerian Seinlassen celebrates a poetic event. In terms of the subduing of intentionality in poetic thinking—where ultimately, as it is understood by Heidegger, intentionality is rendered pointless by the words that operate on the sub-level of meaning, thus, intentionality is defeated by the obscurity of the origin, the origin that in known history intentionality has assumed for itself—Seinlassen is a non-responsal to representational thinking, and more, to history (the history of intending the origin in terms of positive knowledge, such as scientific knowledge) that demands on thought the responsibility for clarity, brevity, intelligibility, and coherence. Seinlassen is the poetic response to history and intentionality.

How can this be similar to Levinas’s non-response?

For it to be of a similar nature and character as Seinlassen, non-response ought to be assumed in light of the task of the retrieval of Being, a task that Levinas does not impose on his project. A faithful reader of Levinas would have Otherwise-than-being or Beyond essence in mind, Levinas’s second major important work.

Seinlassen is not non-responsal (of Levinas): non-responsal does not presuppose Being to the degree that the relation between the I and the Other does not constitute a positive relation of being, nor of being-ness which is immediately expressed in the appropriation of origin by subjectivity. To an even more radical degree, non-responsal is a response of Levinas to the Heideggerian Seinlassen which, owing to the non-negotiable status of Being, its mysterious essence, even to the point at which Heidegger would have logically abandoned the analytic of Being in favor of a rigorous phenomenology of intentions (the fixation on Being betrays the intentionality behind it, suffice it to say, but so does the fixation on the Other about which we will have to say a little more later), makes letting-be a victim of its own forgetfulness—to be more specific, the forgetfulness of the intentionality called Heidegger whom Heidegger obliviously addressed in his call for poeticizing thinking. True to its form, that is, its obliviousness of intentionality, Heidegger (intentionality) once dreamt of the end of history (the end of all intentionalities except the intentionality that intends this end, something of rizomata panton, first intention [oblivious] as first [thus oblivious] philosophy) to be inaugurated by the Nazi.

It is different with the fixation on the Other, the Other who interrupts the sense of subjectivity of the I and its dream of fulfillment. The Other to whom the I is subjected—thus, the founding traumatic origin of the I that is always already preceded by the Other, taken hostage by the non-I “I”, the intending non-ego of the I that is itself also traumatized: the tortuous tenacity of the circle is already unimaginable—interminably subjected to the practice of subjectivity, of the practice of intentionality in service of the Other, the Other who for all its enigma makes intersubjectivity possible, makes a claim on Being possible as an issue, more properly (in Levinas) as an intrigue of the intersubjective, an intersubjective intrigue which is nothing less than existence itself. Existence is the curiousity of this intrigue. But it is a curiousity in which everyone has an interest inasmuch as everyone desires life more than death. Life itself is the enigmatic seduction of this intrigue.

Apropos of its enigmatic relation to the preservation of life that in history has become nearly translatable to killing, murder, war of attrition, genocide, ethnocide, etc., all in the name of saving and celebrating the lives of those more important than anyone else—how different life would have been if we can only wage war with one another with intrigue as a common weapon.

But ultimately, I cannot let this intrigue be without qualification. This ‘intrigue’ is the intrigue introduced by Socrates less than three thousand years ago before the defeat of the intrigue in his eventual persecution. It was the intrigue that sustained the agonal dynamism of the imagined polis of persons with fondness for life and its paradoxes in the guise of the symposium and the republic of friendship flourishing within the margins of the historical polis, within the margins of history, culture, and society.

A fitting description would be the ekstasis of philo-sophia which bids, it always does in light of the everyday confrontation with Being, its farewell to letting-be.

Rethinking the ground of truth

(Excerpts from Rethinking Freedom. Paper presented during the Philosophical Association of the Philippines’ annual conference, 2011)

When philosophy exposes the conditionality of our understanding of Being it therefore exposes much of what it tries to conceal, that which it cannot declare to all men. When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” the death of a false transcendence, that which philosophy once wavered to expose for fear of self-implication, there philosophy finally ceased to be philosophical, ceased to be privy to the concealment of the truth of Being. Philosophy began to confess its own guilt. Its guilt—its love of wisdom, its participation in the concealment of the truth of Being, though innocuous in form; its quiet endurance of the mystery of the ground; its former decision to keep humanity away from the truth of all truths—that there is no truth, only Being.

By reintroducing itself to its proper beginning philosophy is essentially rethinking the mystery of the ground of Being before Being came to be an issue of and for difference, of positing something over against it which necessitated the enactment of the truth of the ontological difference , more correctly, as Heidegger stressed, the untruth of the ontological difference that it is “a doctrine and key for ontological deliberation and forgets what is crucial, namely, that this differentiation has the character of a passage.” It does so in the manner of giving a report, of historicizing the analytic of the interpretation of Being. Indeed, philosophy is at its best when it gives a report on the death of philosophy, when it admits to having seen its own ghost; when it welcomes that ghost, its guilt; when it welcomes the stranger, its other, the other of its professed affinity to truth; when it assumes the impossible life of a half-life, its rebirthing out of the wombs of all the gods of history.

One thing remains crucial though, which can transform even the way philosophy reckons with its fate. It is that freedom can rethink and redefine itself in the most active sense outside of the philosophical, by non-philosophical means, if we can put it that way, by changing the course of history. The non-philosophical is the single greatest achievement of history to which philosophy finds itself opposed most of the time. It suffices to say that philosophy thrives on the non-historical, within the margins of history. Today, within those margins philosophy is giving a report on freedom as freedom is marching in hordes under the din of the voices of resistance and self-determination across the arid lands of the Middle East and North Africa.

Philosophy is interested in the ‘outcome’ of these revolts. While freedom is burning philosophy is already thinking, poeticizing, anticipating, possibilizing its outcome, against the great uncertainty in the horizon, at the same time suffering the revolts, suffering on their behalf in terms of its failure to warn them that there is no truth, only Being, that we are not the starting point, only Time, but also celebrating the self-determination of freedom in terms of its capacity to change the course of history, for better or worse.

Muli, Haring Bastos

Para kay Agrado
(Karakter sa Pelikulang “All About My Mother”)

 

Kung hindi ikaw sino pa
at ano pa nga bang hindi mo kayang dambahin?
Hindi katulad ng iba—
ikaw, kaya mong pag-untugin ang mga alon ng dagat
sa mga palad ko: heto, o hayan diin na diin,
(konti pang diin?)
sa mga suso mong ilang palad na ang nagpasya.
Mapalad ang dibdib.
Palad sa palad, tumataas ang karat
Ng titing pambiyak.

Reaksyon sa Forum sa paggunita ng 150 anibersaryo ng Kaarawan ni Rizal

Lubhang katangi-tangi talaga si Rizal kung ikukumpara sa hanay ng mga tinitingalang bayani ng ibat-ibang lahi sa mundo. Siya lang yata ang hindi nakaranas na makidigma, matakot o pairalin ang tapang sa pagsalubong sa mga bala ng kolonyalismo. Totoong namatay si Rizal sa gatilyo subalit hindi niya ito inani sa pamamagitan ng kabayanihang ipinamalas halimbawa ng mga anak-pawis na nagsulong ng adhikain ng Katipunan. Karamihan sa mga bayaning tinatangkilik hanggang sa ngayon ng ibat-ibang lahi sa mundo ay rebolusyonaryo—ibig sabihin, inilantad ang katawan, pinairal ang himagsik ng katawan laban sa makinarya ng pang-aapi, pang-aabuso, pagsasamantala.

Ano ang katawan? Hindi ba ang katawan ang siyang tumanggap ng sakit at parusa ng di-makataong pag-iral ng kolonyalismo? At kung umaaray ang katawan, kung umaangal sa pang-aabuso, kung sumisigaw ng kalayaan—hindi ba maituturing ito na ang katawan ay kabuuan ng pagiging-tao? Ito ang katawang naghimagsik sa kolonyalismo.

Hindi maipagkakailang may katawan si Rizal: katawang masasabi nating lumaban sa pang-aapi. Katawan ni Rizal ang naglikha ng kanyang mga nobela, nagbigay-katawan sa mga sulating tumutuligsa sa dispensasyong kolonyal. Maituturing na wala siyang pinag-iba sa mga Katipunero—kung pag-uusapan ang diskurso ng katawan. Subalit, namamatay ang katawan, nagtatapos sa alabok. Sa kontemporaryong diskurso, synchronic ang abot-kakayanan o tanaw ng katawan. May yugto ang katawan, ibig sabihin, may katapusan kumpara sa patuloy na paggulong ng panahon.

Hindi kayang lagpasan ng katawan ang diachronic na pag-iral ng panahon, ang patuloy na paggulong ng oras. Subalit, sa diachronic na analitik maaaring pag-usapan ang katawan, usapang-katawan na maaaring humantong sa usapang ob-scene. Ano ba ng obscene? Obscene sa Ingles: “indecent; disgusting.” Sa lenggwahe ng penomenolohiya, obscene maituturing ang “inversion” ng imahe o appearance ng isang bagay. Dahil dito obscene na maituturing ang pornograpiya dahil binabaligtad niya ang anggulo ng pagsipat o pagtanaw sa ordinaryo o katangi-tanging mukha ng mga bagay na pumuputol sa kumpiyansa ng normal na pagtingin sa mga bagay. Bunsod nito nalilikha ang anomalya o scandal sa pagtingin. Ipinapakita sa pornograpiya ang itinuturing nitong aktwal na nangyayari, halimbawa, sa katawan habang umiinit ang koneksyuong senswal. Layon ng pornograpiya na hubaran ang katawan upang ipakita ang totoong itsura nito, ipamalas ang kaibuturang pag-iral ng senswal. Alam natin—tayong hindi nanonood daw ng pornograpiya—na walang patutungahan ang inversion na ito dahil hindi mauubos ang pantasya hangga’t may katawan, o hangga’t may katawang hindi kailanman mahuhubaran. Ito ang sikreto ng katawan. Sagrado siyang maituturing. Sa katotohanan, iyon ang ipinapakita ng pornograpiya—hindi mahuhubaran ang katawan. Ang dulo ng katawan ay lamang molecular, atomic na transcendental na maituturing. Ang misteryo ng katawan? Lagpas-senswal.

Ngayon, pinag-uusapan natin ang hubad na katawan ni Rizal, katawang, gaya ng sinabi ko, ay lagpas-senswal. Sa lenggwahe ni Levinas, transcendental sensualism. Hinihikayat tayo ng diskurso na ito na silipin ang katawan ni Rizal sa paraang lagpas. Dito masasabi na diachronic na pornograpiya ang gagawin nating diskurso kay Rizal. Huhubaran natin ang katawan niya, tatalupan ng ‘skin’. Sa katotohan matagal na nating ginagawa ang ganitong uri ng pornograpiya. Iyon ang itinuturo natin sa klase—Buhay at Aral ni Rizal. Bastos ba ito? Bastos ba tayo? Bastos bang maituturing ang mga pinagpipitagang guro ng Kasaysayan na nagtuturo ng pornograpiyang ito? Kung pornograpiya nga, bakit wala yatang umaangal, maghain ng kaso laban sa kanila sa isang maituturing na paglabag sa moralidad ng lipunan?

Masarap kasi. Lahat tayo nasasarapan.

 

June 29, 2011
Claro M. Recto Hall
PUP

The Ubiquity of Short Memory

This is my comment on Fr. Edicio Dela Torre’s wonderful piece on his blogpost at http://edicio.wordpress.com/ concerning, among others, his interrupted stint as PUP OIC.

 

It makes me think that the over-all motif of your ‘light philosophical musing’, as you put it, tends to invoke the quiet possibility of a sort of justice “that was never meant to be,” for good or bad, but the same justice that quietly interrupts our unchangeable relation to the past—the past that we can’t change though we can put in brackets, as the saying goes in phenomenology about which I suppose you know much better than I do, given your extensive theo and philo background.

The pervasiveness of the “what ifs” in the post teases out a silent confirmation that reality had not been fair, or even still, had it been fair at least on the grounds that it satisfied an average expectation, tends to demand more, the more as the becoming-less of what had been the case against which the question of what-if is raised with a view to disrupting the unchallenged status of an antecedent (the denseness of its structure) that influences the present. What had been the case demands that it be treated as all, as everything, unquestionable, necessary. But the possibility of raising an interruption, such as a question in the middle of a conversation, say, a what-if interjection that breaks the linearity of a narrative, is guaranteed by time. If it is guaranteed by time, it is only a matter of time when justice is served. In the meantime, a TRO has interrupted this ‘only a matter of time’ with a view to permanent injunction, again, the point of pervasiveness belabored, against time.

What makes this post so interesting to me is its relevance to our local struggle in PUP where I teach (I teach philosophy) and to which you can concretely relate as our ex-OIC, as you put it. Your being our OIC: some kind of a justice that was never meant to be. But I take these ‘what ifs’ of yours in relation to what is happening in our university in the wake of the interruption of your ‘time-as-OIC’ as an opportunity to keep tabs on time-keepers, especially those whose interest in time suggests that they are out to erase memory, especially, historical memory. Memory is an important term here. Memory keeps the sense of justice alive. It keeps tabs on what had been, what needs to be corrected, what needs to be rooted out. Memory is the platform of justice that accommodates the question ‘what if’. Erase memory and everything will repose in evil, that is to say, the complete absence of memory.

It makes me think, despite my personal wish that this conflict would end soon, that it would be more desirable if this time-interruption takes longer than we can expect if only to give time an opportunity to resurrect a good memory. One reason PUP is vulnerable to the seductive appeal of political absurdity is that many have short memories, short of no-memories, which is not a good memory. Short memory guarantees the permanence of ebb in active and critical participation in the everyday conduct of academic life that should not be restricted to instruction. Instruction, without the support of re-search (in essence research is time-reckoning or the active memorialization of the universal precept that the good must prevail over evil, which is what educating ultimately means, hence, education is supposed to be the infrastructure of research), guarantees quite ironically the subtle permanence of ignorance. For many decades, PUP excels in instruction which is co-determined by short memory and the propensity for politicizing the academe.

Perhaps, we need another TRO, even more a permanent injunction, yet this time, and the time to come, a TRO or an injunction against the unchallenged ubiquity of short memory.

Para kay Daniel

(Nag-email si Daniel. Nangangamusta…At nakiusap…Buong teksto makikita sa seksyon II ng ‘post’ na ito)

I

Ang sarap pakinggan ng mga dalit mo, kasama. Parang awit ni Gary Granada, awit na binabalik-balikan o bumabalik sa alaala. (Naks!). Heto ang ilang putol sa awit (mga linyang tumatak sa isip):

“Ano ang gagawin ng pusong hindi mapagbigyan?
Ang magkatunggaling pangako at pakiramdam
May isang paru-parong paroroo’t paririyan
Sa pagitan ng ngayon at kailanman…”

At heto ang malupit:

“Ibig kong alamin kung ang pag-big may puwang
Sa pagitan ng ngayon at kailanman…”

Kung alam mo ang awit na ito, kantahin mo.Huwag nang magpatumpik-tumpik.
Magparaya sa kiliti ng mga titik, mensaheng mala-Rilke sa diwang sabik sa halik…

May kung anong dumadapo sa buhay mo kasama. Pakiwari ko’y paru-paro…
Anupaman, insekto…

II

tol, kumusta? di ko makontak mga number mo na nasa akin. wala na ba ang mga to? tol, pakipasadahan naman. comment pls. thanks! godspeed!

Pag-Ibig
ni dan fangon

pag-ibig.
kumatok. pinagbuksan.
mananahan. sa pusong hungkag sa
pagmamahal.
pagmamahal.
yumapos. naramdaman.
hinagkan. ang labing tigang sa
halik.
halik.
kay tapat. pinagbigyan.
pinawalan. mga diwang dati’y walang
tinig.
tinig.
narinig. pinakinggan
naunawaan. kaluluwang bihag ng
nakaraan.
nakaraan
nilingon. malilimutan.
iiwan. ng mga pusong tigib sa
pag-ibig.
pag-ibig.
kumatok. pinagbuksan
mananahan. sa pagitan ng
noon at kailanman.

—Hulyo 16, 2011 0705, Cubao, Quezon City
(All rights reserved)

Muli, Haring Bastos

 

“The history of the ethical body cannot assume a narrative form. It is, rather, a history in [the sense] of…the pre-history of the I…This history can, however, begin to be told through an evocative abuse of language” (John Drabinski, Sense and Singularity [New York: State University of New York, 2001], 209)

 

Maiba Tayo

Ikaw nga. Ikaw na ikaw
Ako—ako rin, singular.
Parehong bulag.
Oo nga.
Hindi tayo magsintulad, at
Lalong hindi magkaiba,
Sana makita mo na,
(Lalayo ka pa ba gayong heto na?)
Hayan…

Ganyan nga. Pumikit ka lang.
Nakita mo ba si Loleng?
Kapitbahay ni Mario? Siya nga.
Siyang siya. Kawawang Loleng.

Buti nga kung ganon. Mabuti na kung ganon.
Kesa namang magtiis siya.
Tama. Wala ng mainam pang gawin
Kundi yakapin ang pangako ng takipsilim.
Malay mo, bukas iba na ang amoy ng umaga.

Maiba tayo.
Tanga ka kung iniisip mong may ikukwento ako.
Si Susan ang te..te..ko…Sino kamo testigo?
Hintayin nating dumaan si Susan.

Saan ka pa ba patungo Levinas kung hindi dito?
Gagalangin mo maski te..te..ko.
Ako ang testigo ng pagkahumaling mo ke Tu..tan.

“PagtumayonatetekokaTutantayo!”

Sigaw ng batang bungi.

Under the Storm

That is the title of an anthology of contemporary Filipino poetry (in which my poems are included) edited by filmmaker Khvan Dela Cruz

I chanced upon a blog owned by Anne Carly Abad (http://the-sword-that-speaks.blogspot.com/2011/07/under-storm-anthology-of-contemporary.html) who posted the final list of poets who made it to the anthology, including some of the finest literary writers and poets in the country.

Feels good. But, is it really the good that feels me, or the feeling that goods me, or the me that I lost in a storm once upon a time?

Book Launch: 2 September 2011

                      Ayala Museum, Makati City

                      6 PM

On Levinas and Irigaray: A Fiction of Truth

From Emmanuel to Luce: Precis of a Critique

(excerpts)

To Jason and Eloisa

Emmanuel:

I touched you and my hand reached something.
I sensed more than porosity.
I knew I had to lick my fingers.
I can count to ten and count the times
I shriveled at every finish.

Luce:

But you were not there, even still, your mystery.
The indifference of you, oh you, Emmanuel!
Wasn’t it you who were foreign to all words,
All traces of grammar, figures of saying?
André, didn’t your words reach Strausborg,
Those you wrote best at the needling of gender,
Those words that make love?

When they make love words lick our tongues.
Even still, we lick our sweat until they harden into frost.
At its freezing detail the body shows up molested,
Resentful of words unyielding to ends.

Whose words are they?
Yours? Mine? Theirs? Others?
Of man? A woman’s?
Your ghosts, Emmanuel, your ghosts!

Emmanuel:

You Woman, the ferine alter of the Same.
You are that, and that is that, even still, we
Are in-different, neither different nor less same.
Rootless we both are!

That alone makes me crave for nowhereness,
Yearn to touch the ultimate letter of your grace!
I long to feel your specter in the distance you make
Outside of the light, to the hither side of space.
Oh, woman—

Why only time can touch you?
Why only darkness can make of your mystery?
Why no light is enough to make you cry for the sun?

Luce:

Can’t you rather touch me, Emmanuel,
In the chasm of time that you cleverly space
Into the hither? Here and there
You can hear the echoes of the gods: Here
Life encounters the mysteries of orgasm,
There, the void tells of dreams fulfilled.
What space denies you time offers to cross.
Which is which? My lips or my vulva?

Lips speak of your love, of the immanence of the two,
Unmindful of God, justice; of the child, the future.
Lips accomplish your face-to-face.

But the freshly folds of heavens, I say many heavens!
Haven’t you seen much?
What of your failure to blow your zeal,
That sweet aching for creation,
That only the infinite can offer?

Emmanuel:

You see God. I see the Infinite.

Luce:

On face-to-face I see Him.
In you love speaks of failure to exceed.
What else is there for the two to make?
André can tell you much better—
They are words looking for love.
Words are more than their voices,
Piercing or quiet.

Still, love may stumble on a wrong partner,
An other in the same looking for a third term.
For God, for justice? They are more than words Emmanuel!

Oh, from where you kneel behind my second lips,
Canter at an arc that colors all rainbows,
This sweep that wiggles to your shows,
I don’t see what you see.
Even still, you mumble a name.

It’s that name that you grip in your arms Emmanuel!

All Rights Reserved

Notes on Contemporary Philosophy (I): A Class Guide

 

Most of us in our early years of engaging philosophy had been led to believe that philosophy is concerned with the process of acquiring wisdom and the tools of reasoning that are deemed essential in dealing with the problems of existence. The all but perfunctory integration of the terms philo and sophia which imposes on philosophy a facile meaning has been rarely treated with a grain of salt.

This is one proof that within the tradition of philosophy philosophizing is characterized by the demand of integration, synthesis and unity of terms. There is nothing wrong with that because philosophy utilizes terms to convey concepts except when we confuse philosophy with synthesizing concepts into an independent coherent structure that is transcendent to philosophic activity. Since its early beginnings in the Milesian school, philosophy has proved itself an anathema of totality and transcendence, of rigid unity and positivistic identity in favor of the free variation of thinking. Even still, and at its best, philosophy is considered to be a different approach, a different way of understanding reality.

Its distinctness may be said to rest on two mutually opposing terms, love and wisdom; opposite in the sense that as the ancient Greeks understood it darkness is the opposite of light, emptiness fullness, mystery illumination. This intrinsic opposition is exemplified by the philosopher herself. In Plato’s time, a philosopher is seen as someone who is different because only a philosopher has made it her business to nurture the power of paradoxes, one who is inclined to preserve the integrity of equipollence such that between two alternatives of the same weight, validity or effect upon human judgement a way out is consciously suppressed, not without the pain that comes with restriction on finality and closure. The point is to back away from making a definitive or conclusive judgment about reality. This explains, for instance, the aporetic nature of the Platonic dialogues whose original inspiration is no less the Socratic exercise of the dialectic where opposites are played out for their own sake, avoiding the possibility of harmonizing contradictions in the guise of a transcendent category, such as the many examples of bad faith in philosophizing which Jean-Paul Sartre once lamented. We speak of the ‘transcendent’ in its original Platonic meaning, a meaning that contrary to popular interpretation of Plato really defines the heart of the dialectic, a meaning that favors the vigilance of skepticism. The ‘transcendent’ is something that awakens reason to its limits, its mortality and proness to error. That ‘something’ is always the question of origin or the first beginning that reason can only approximate in terms of the useful fictions of the mind.

I have noted in my introduction that philosophy is distinct in the sense that it flourishes in some type of a conscious awareness of contradictions. This contradiction is very well emphasized in philosophia, love of wisdom but since the collapse of the Academy years after the death of Plato this point has been looked down as a minor concern. Even still, the erotic (love) foundation of the pursuit of truth is something that philosophers from the Presocratics to the systematic thinkers of recent date intuitively agree. That ‘thinking’ itself is inspired by the material power of the sensual or the aesthetic root of knowing is also well noted in scientific disciplines, especially those that study the phylogenesis of reason, such as the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, but also those belonging to so-called quasi-scientific adventures such as of Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s. In recent philosophy, inspired by a renewal of Kantian doctrines, this is officially enucleated in the term ‘immanence’ which roughly means the ‘order of the possible’, the possible as the human condition. Beyond the possible lies the category of the transcendent.

But the transcendent is not a positive category of being that is superior to immanence. The transcendent is what remains after the “saturation of the field of phenomena.” In the language of deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida, this transcendent reveals itself as a ‘trace’, a trace of something that reason fails to contain. It is therefore a trace of failure. For as early as the time of the Platonic Socrates, this failure already beckons to something other than reason itself, or in the language of Emmanuel Levinas, otherwise than being, that is, being as a positive category. In Parmenides, an important Platonic dialogue, this otherwise than being is described as the Good, the Good beyond Being that exceeds the category of being and also that which awakens being to its finitude, to its limitation and mortality. Again, the limit to finitude is not something that overwhelms human existence to the point of defeat; rather, it is something that interrupts the claim of reason vis-à-vis the task of understanding and mastering reality.

Going back to our earlier point: if wisdom can be attained in and through the activity of the erotic (love)—very obviously, philosophy chooses no other activity than the erotic vis-à-vis the goal of knowing, which is wisdom—then it may be argued with equity that wisdom, the highest form of knowledge, can be achieved in and through the adventures of the otherwise than rational. The non-rational, love itself, initiates the process of achieving the rational. Clearly, in this format, philosophy is a process of differentiation, otherwise than rational, of nourishing differences. Philosophy is difference itself. Needless to say, a philosopher is someone who is different.

Presumably, a philosopher is different from the rest who value unity, synthesis, and false transcendence. This marks the difference of philosophia from doxa, public opinion and superstition. For the ancient Greeks, specifically, the “republic of genuises from Thales to Socrates,” or the Platonic Socrates, philosophy is “thinking without presuppositions,” a type of discipline akin to the free association of phenomenology, and to a certain extent of psychoanalysis, or the free variation of the discipline of the arts. But what makes the ancient freer than its modern counterpart lies in the vigilance of the Greeks against the illusory aims of modernity in terms of the facile demand for harmony, totality and transcendence. These values were widely sponsored by the polis, the precursor of modern political rationality, against the fundamental aims of philosophy which promotes a logic of discontinuity in defiance of the totalizing project of the polis. This logic of discontinuity is what the late Gilles Deleuze described just about as difference engineering, a conceptual generation and regeneration of the structures of reality in ways that resist dominant forms of understanding, even so, of the hard and fast logic of constructing new concepts and demolishing outdated ones. The philosopher is thus a difference engineer. But as an engineer of difference, the philosopher is not involved in construction, even demolition. These activities belong in history. The philosopher is concerned rather about the presuppositions which motivate construction and destruction, of inauguration and dissolution, etc. It is as if the philosopher does not know the actual and real presuppositions. But as Socrates exemplified during his time, the practice of the maieutic, a variant of the dialectical procedure, can help one attain a deeper awareness of the intentional pressuposition of the human act. The intention behind the act is otherwise than rational which may be interpreted in terms of fundamental materiality.

The closest material presupposition of the human act is the erotic that traces its roots in human desire. For one thing, this provides the background to the Lacanian structure of human nature as a desiring machine. But as early as Plato, philosophy is certain about the presupposition that humans rather than completely rational species are a bunch of desiring bipeds. In this light, we may consider the Aristotelian concept of human nature—that Man is a rational animal—as an anomaly, a scandal within the tradition of philosophy. Thinking is not perfectly synonymous with the rational. At the root of thinking is the erotic. It is this eroticism that rationalist philosophy, initiated by metaphysics, consigns to the darkness of evil whose intention is molded by the supposed lack of order and decency, and a clear absence of logical structure of the human instincts. Rationalist philosophy departs from the original erotic intention of philosophy in favor of order, harmony, totality, finality and closure—altogether the appeal to transcendence which in the strict history of philosophy began with Aristotle.

These modern values are celebrated in terms of enforcing ridiculous terms of discipline, and also in terms of reduction, categorization, and positivization carried out by the use of force, speed, and the utilization of the connective and synthetic power of the public that dissolves individual differences into statistical values which threaten autonomy and uniqueness. In the actual shape of things, autonomy is the autonomy of difference, that one is primordially unique, free and different as the other is equally so. The danger of totalization, synthesis and reduction is that it can sacrifice the autonomy of difference (immanence) in favor of the autonomy of the whole, of the One, of Society, of the State, of God, thus, the autonomy of transcendence. One of the dangers in living in modern times is that we are compelled to sacrifice autonomy of difference in favor of the autonomy of transcendence. We are compelled to value the freedom of the non-human and of the non-being as a key to attaining human happiness. This explains humanity’s obsession with money, power, stature, and fame, which are all non-human and non-being for the simple reason that these terms of happiness are extraneous to the erotic, the erotic as the being of Being, the ultimate structure of reason, the otherwise than rational structure of the human condition that reason will always fail to contain and saturate. What therefore truly underlies rationalistic philosophy is that real happiness is not of this world. We can only rationalize happiness by means of supplicating the erotic with gifts, toys, bank accounts, and a chance to ventilate desire by exercising power within the corporate ladder and political bureaucracy.

That is why for Kant what is not of this world belongs in the noumena. But the genius of Kant lies somewhere else. The noumenon accounts for the trace of what reason fails to contain. But the noumenon is not a transcendent category that reason invokes when it meets a snag. What reason fails to saturate the otherwise than rational can address. It cannot be addressed within the terms of reason responsible for the historical emergence and sustainability of the transcendent. For Kant the ethical, the otherwise than rational, can alone address the trace, the remainder of what is—that remainder being the ‘ought’ of ethics. But even Kant is very much a child of his time, a child of the indisputable transcendence of history that limited his understanding of the task of philosophy. For him the task of philosophy is to lay bare the rationalistic foundations of the human condition and how in actuality these foundations are otherwise than rational. In the end Kant exposed the otherwise than rational foundation of transcendent categories such as God, immortality and soul, previously held to be metaphysical categories. With this Kant believed he had achieved a non-metaphysical because otherwise than rational justification of transcendence.

Kant was an immanentist in the sense of radicalizing the transcendent power of human freedom, its capacity to immortalize without depending on the belief that there is really God out there. Kantian philosophy is also a rationalistic metaphysics which in the end was put to the service of justifying the secular aims of religion. But these secular aims, as Kant himself recommended, should not be made known to all. Like Plato’s noble lie, God must still be held an object of mystery. Philosophy must not betray this secret. It is incumbent upon philosophy to justify the existence of God to the public where unfortunately reason does not play a dominant role. Reason rather belongs in the realm of knowledge, contemplation, and absolute singularity that is attained through the perfection of wisdom and virtue. The public task of philosophy is to educate, to lead people into the path of reason, into absolute singularity though it will take time before they can accept that God, or any powerful image of transcendence such as the State, is merely a useful fiction. The public task of philosophy is to teach people how to suspend rather temporarily their membership in the totality molded into being by the noble lie to regain their individual autonomies where reason can be pursued with much concentration. To this end, Hegel attempted to complete the task by once and for all putting an end to transcendence.

The Hegelian murder of transcendence is actualized by history. Human history takes the place of the noumenon, the trace of what reason cannot contain. History dissolves the density of the noumenon into the transparency of the phenomenon. We speak of density in terms of thickness which suggests of impenetrability and the unfathomable. The common opposite of these terms (impenetrable and unfathomable) is penetrability. Penetration dissolves thickness and darkness. In Hegelian terms, penetration is carried out by the light of reason. Reason illuminates the space formerly conquered by darkness symbolized by the night where, according to a familiar Hegelian metaphor, all cows turn black. In the light of day, cows turn up in their colorful variation. It is in this sense that history is the active power that encloses Being against non-Being, against Nothingness, against Emptiness and the Void. It is history that decides that Being is, and Nothingness is not. Contrary to popular interpretation, Hegelian philosophy is a practical philosophy. What makes it practical is that Hegel dismissed as mystical all philosophies that articulate the transcendence of the unknown in favor of the knowability of the phenomenon. What is passed for as noumenal is simply for Hegel the state of obscurity of the phenomenon in the absence of the light of reason.

Even still, Hegel’s project of putting an end to transcendence leaves much to be desired. It may be recalled that Kant proposed an and-time as a saturation point to all human endeavors, presumably a point at which all questions of life are resolved. The end-time concept is a necessary postulate to justify hope and also essential in terms of rationalizing the provisional necessity of transcendent categories such as God. However, Kant was unsure which time is it—human time or objective time? It may be argued that Kant was not thinking of human time—he earlier postulated that time is a mental construct—otherwise end-time would mean the necessity of suicide. He would have not thought of ending time as objective because following his internal logic time is the infinite noumenal that no reason can contain. It may suffice to say that after all Kant was simply playing along with possibilities in the hope of plugging the gaps that his philosophy had created.

Instead of end-time Hegel proposed the end of history, the saturation of the field of phenomena. Hegel therefore proposed an end from within, not from without, not from time which remains outside of phenomena. The perfection of the phenomenal world is enough to put an end to transcendence, to time. Devoid of a world to effectuate upon, transcendence and time lose their integrity. God becomes alone in the universe He created. Alone God is practically non-existent. God is dead. Transcendence is dead. Long live the immanence of humanity. Even still, immanence happens to be a crowded place, and a place defined by conflicting human interests. Karl Marx inverted this Hegelian immanence in terms of saturating the plane of immanence with a universalizable interest of the collective, a universal emancipatory category that brings with it the promise of ending the conflictual essence of immanence. In the end Marx like Hegel wanted to start with a clean slate, with a new immanence to replace the immanence of the old. Altogether, they avoided the possibility of transcendence, of going beyond immanence consistent with their mutual anti-Kantian doctrines which emphasize their refusal to accept the noumenal nature of transcendence, that transcendence cannot be perfectly contained unless time ends from without as Kant nearly suggested.

Post-Hegelian philosophy will be characterized by a reaction to the horror of murdering transcendence exemplified by the rise of National Socialism and to a greater extent by the modern totalitarian ideologies of Stalinism and Maoism. With the exception of Heidegger who joined the Nazi party, post-Hegelianism, such as of the reactions of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre are attempts to reintroduce philosophy, attempts to rephilosophize the tradition of philosophy and possibly rescue it from the seduction of modern forms of rationality. In a nutshell modern rationality favors transcendence over immanence, totality over autonomy, unity over difference. But the clearest emphasis of modern rationality is the imitation of transcendence which is then concretely applied on the plane of immanence. It may be recalled that Plato started this critical tradition of interrogating the mimetic adventure of rationality in his criticism of poetry. For Plato the danger lies in imitating a transcendence that does not exist apart from the manifestation of a necessary illusion that the mind initiates and proposes.

It is clear for Plato that to philosophize is to unmask the pretensions of transcendence which to him is not only restricted to the pretenses of poetry but also extend to social, cultural, and political spheres of human existence. Unexamined pretenses can become extremely powerful and pervasive. However, to examine these pretenses is not an easy thing to do. And to examine them by means of philosophizing is even more difficult. As Heidegger stressed:

“[According] to its essence, philosophy never makes things easier, but only more difficult. And it does so not just incidentally, not just because its manner of communication seems estranged or even deranged to everyday understanding. The burdening of historical Dasein, and thereby at bottom of Being itself, is rather the genuine sense of what philosophy can achieve. Burdening gives back to things, to beings, their weight (Being).” (Introduction to Metaphysics, 12)

Though Heidegger’s philosophical journey was tainted by his corroboration with the Nazi, we could not care less about his acute analysis of what philosophy can achieve. It may suffice to say that even a philosopher such as his stature can become a victim of a false transcendence. This also reveals the difficulties and dangers of philosophizing. Philosophers are seemingly elected by the things themselves, to give back to them their weight that has been ignored by history, by humanity’s obsession with transcendence. For the reason alone that elects philosophic activity to the task of giving back the weight of things to things themselves, philosophizing has never been more pressing and exceptionally demanding within the tradition of philosophy. Needless to say, to philosophize is to be responsible for the future of philosophic tradition.

Husserl and the question of the ethicality of intentionality

To Mitch Cay for her blitzkrieg performance at the Philosophy Circle of the Philippines’s Panel Discussion on the “Poetry and Language of Care” held at the Ateneo De Manila University last August 27, 2011

—————————————————–

Husserl’s self-criticism over the psychologism of his first work, Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891), can help us understand the horizon that Plato had seen when he exposed the limitation of mathematical rationality. Husserl earlier proposed that the validity of mathematical truths is independent of how the knowing subject learns them. When Husserl argued against his early work he correctly discerned that human imagination, the auto-affection of the subject is transcendent even to mathematics. But only a properly intending consciousness full to its capacity and aware of its limits can transcend the accomplishments of reason. Consciousness must therefore be the proper object of philosophical analysis.

From the Platonic standpoint it may be argued that Husserl saw the limitation of mathematics in the same way that Plato did but neglected the content of the Platonic criticism of mathematical or instrumental reason, namely, the intention of absolute difference that motivates its quest for truth. Even still, from a Levinasian standpoint, Plato would have criticised Husserl’s Cartesian bias. The Platonic concept of the Good beyond Being furnishes us not only Plato’s criticism of mathematical knowledge, but also his guarded stance towards the achievements of even contemplative reason. The notion of the Good beyond Being invokes a limit to reason’s power of differentiation, its capacity to concretize its adventures in categories and logical predications, its consummate empiricism in terms of the saturation of existence with existent structures reproducible by either force or habit. This Platonic notion has acquired a linguistic expression in contemporary thought as ethicality, an ethic of difference based on a peripheral sense of existence that interrupts the complacency of the concrete, the substantive stability of the what is and the what are, the working structures of existence as they are known to be premised on differentiation. In traditional philosophy this has come to be known as the difference between being and non-being, in short, the centrality of being. This ethic of difference is opposed to a familiar ethic of difference based on the differentiation of existence and non-existence, of being and non-being that reason sharpens into ontological truth. This ethic of difference is strictly non-ontological and non-epistemic, hence, properly ethical.

Within the immanence of reason differentiation is an internal ontological and epistemic adventure, that is to say, freedom, bound by synchronicity and the vertical movement of existence. Differentiation enacts difference from within a supposed unitary structure, that is, existence or being. Outside or around being is the sphere of nothingness, the sphere of in-difference which threatens to reduce being to the absurdity of its quest for completion, self-emancipation and individuation. Lying outside, in-difference encircles difference, confines being within its immanent boundary, seals the site of being against the possibility of escape, emancipation and transcendence; reduces being into a tedious process of immanent differentiation without the support of non-being, to be precise, of time which is non-being. Around the sphere of difference is the supposed in-difference of the beyond-being, the full density of non-being, the indifference of time, the thickness of the Same, the In-different. But insofar as the differentiation of existence is contingent on time, this interior determination is forced to enact an interior sense of time, consciousness, that is, vis-a-vis the unconditionality of a time that moves in diachronicity, outside of the interiority of existence regardless of its determination. Ex-istence is therefore forced to divide itself from within, between existence and the outside of it within an interior determination. This only shows that freedom never rests even at the price of absurdity.

Heidegger’s breakthrough in exposing this sense of interiority without the support of time which leads to inauthentic existence must be acknowledged for laying bare the absurdity of pure immanence. Also, the notion of thrownness (Geworfenheit), itself a conceptual tour de force (despite its Christian connotation) which breaks open the immanent boundary of differentiation that allows being to get a glimpse of the outside—something that remained unthought in philosophy until the publication of Being and Time. Let it suffice to say that the notion of thrownness opens a hole in the immanent circle of existence—Man can only be thrown from outside being, from a dimension of time. If He is thrown from within and into some place within then the origin of thrownness, which is Man’s origin, can easily be discovered within being. The origin is being itself—which is the heart and soul of immanentism. The origin is positivized as the primacy of being over non-being which justifies the supremacy of being over time. Since time is immediately discerned as non-being, the inferiority of time is carried over into the logic of differentiation between and among beings which are in essence differentiated. This explains the goal of differentiation to establish a hierarchy of Being, a vertical structure and movement of time which ignores the unassumable, the open, the unguarded, the vulnerable and exposed condition of being or existence to such an extent that the key to an effective assumption of positive existence, of shelteredness and strength of being lies in a progressive form of self-enclosure. In the history of knowledge, this self-enclosure has created the divide between low and high culture, between the pedestrian and the elite, etc., in which relationality is strictly defined by vertical strength, by ontological and a strictly ethical differentiality based on competence. On the one hand, differentiation enacts a politics of Being. On the other hand, it creates a metaphysic of time, that is, a concept of time that results from the intention of absolute difference.

The 2oth century phenomenology propounded by Husserl did exactly just that. On the one hand, phenomenalization is an attempt to saturate the conceptual possibilities of differentiation from within the immanent determination of existence. On the other hand, temporalization is the extension of absolute difference from being into non-being, provided that difference is located within being. But the plane of immanence is an overcrowded place of vertical determination. The temporalization of being in terms of the upward movement of time, the synchronicity of a time-structure, is a means to keep the sense of interiority alive, the sense of freedom, unwilling to yield existence to nothingness. But this notion of time can work if autonomy, emancipation and individuation are denied in favour of a hierarchy of being—a far cry from what immanence claimed to defend against the enduring threat of time (the threat of nothingness). In the final analysis Husserl’s notion of the transcendental ego commits itself to this immanent differentiation in which an otherwise than epistemic and ontological consideration of time as the outside of immanence, outside of absolute difference, time as the Indifference of the Same, is lacking if not intentionally overlooked.

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Excerpt from a paper read during a seminar on “Ethics of Care” sponsored by Societas Philosophiae, PUP, as a prelude  to the PCP seminar on the same theme.

Sex and the Cogito: Intersex of Plato, Lacan, Levinas and Irigaray (updated version)

[Full text of my talk on Feminism and Philosophy of Sex during the Institute of Social History and Department of The Humanities Seminar Series held on September 9, 2011 at the Bulwagang Bonifacio Hall]

The invitation I have to this seminar states that I will be speaking not far off between doing philosophy and doing sex (doing as in talking about sex which is more correct).

Earlier, the Philosophy Society wanted me to give a talk on feminism, and frankly I had never been so ill at ease.

In terms of my philosophical training, I can connect the feeling I had at that moment to a totalizing concept. That is the concept of singularity, in itself a concept of difference. Let me tell you about this concept:

“My being a ‘man’ or ‘male’, whatever you call it, already locates my being within a context of singularity with its predetermined structure of meaning, a unique ego-logic constitution, even symbolic objects of fantasy which set me apart from a woman, another being, and are therefore indications of my being different, my being a unique factor over against someone that gives me exclusive power of existence, that is, to exist as a universal subject of history.”

Or so what I and most thinking male species but also unthinking ones of even still a thinking lot have been made to assume and profess. This is of course a fallacy derived from the Cartesian cogito: I think, therefore I am. Because I thought it first—the ‘it’ marking a moment of discovery of the subjective kernel of reality—therefore, I am the first. And you can see I am a Man.

As many of my so-called ‘progressive’ male colleagues can attest, it is difficult for a man to be a feminist. Simply put, feminism is a reaction against the abuses of the masculine order—my abuses and every other male’s, whether a son, a brother, a father, an uncle, or what have you, but they must be adult to begin with.

Today, we can say that modern society is a far cry from the old patriarchal order because women are becoming assertive, ushering a break in the continuum of male history. While that is true, it is also tenable to hold that men are also becoming increasingly aware of the limits and miscarriages of this history, their history, such that we can recognize a history that at the minimum is taking a new turn. For this I consider myself a feminist.

But if it is going to be a question of sex, my being a feminist is not enough. For sex, as Jacques Lacan would say, is beyond any relation that a man or woman can agree or disagree to have. There is simply no sexual relation to begin with much less end without. There is only sex.

You probably know by now why I agreed to speak on the two topics, feminism and philosophy of sex, after the organizers of the forum decided to combine them. First, I think the two topics speak of one syllable and that is sex. (Unsurprisingly, to combine is reminiscent of intercourse). That will make my job a piece of cake because to all appearances I will be dealing with a monosyllable that is mightily easier to pronounce.

Second, though spoken as a monosyllable sex is always thought of in multiple differentiated thought-syllables as Sigmund Freud had shown. Sex is otherwise secretly uttered as a longing, a craving, or consummation; sometimes a trophy, other times an implacable memory of fear and trembling; occasionally a lingering taste of immaculate joy, but mostly, a disappointment. For this, as most adult male species of our genus can attest not without having gone through a long pilgrimage to self-admission, sex is a tall order of the day. Meaning: It is a request that cannot be easily fulfilled. Philosophically—an appeal to which any responsal will always be found wanting.

§

To respond to this type of tall order, as we can deduce from the Platonic dialogues, is to deal with the primordial obsession of all human cultures, that is, to venture into the impossible reunion of two sexed bodies into one sexless originary being that throughout ages has informed Man’s obsession with unity and harmony, on the level of community ethos, and with the metaphysical transcendence of the One or the Same, on the level of the historical.

To achieve the originary sameness of being is an impossible objective. But this has been the obsession of the masculine.

Ultimately, the goal of sex (inscribed in the masculine psyche about which we will learn more when we turn to Lacan) is to reduce differences into the Same which implies a totalitarian motive. The Same is the origin of differences, and thus of the species with differences internal to the Same. But as origin it cannot be duplicated which the masculine rather attempts to make two of.

Among others this explains Plato’s critique of mimesis (the process of making two of one) which poetry exercises. The Same becomes a business of taxonomy, such as a class, a genus or family in which related species are grouped together. The Same is a concept of singularity which in itself accommodates differences and yet differences are variations in being qua being, but not in terms of the absolute ground or origin. In terms of the absolute ground or origin, the Same is the same for all conceivable origins, and thus for all times. The Same is a necessary tautology, a necessary nihilism of human existence.

Though he did not deny its necessity Plato had seen this nihilism as a threat to the human condition. As a necessity the Same is a fabrication of the origin, ‘a noble lie’. This lie is instigated by the masculine order, the republic of the guardians. Plato’s instinct can tell us that he was ill at ease with this concept.

Take note that Socrates’s audience was all-male; most were trained in sophistry, at the same time expressive of their liking for virtue over vice that was shaping Athenian culture. But they were reluctant to govern and change the lives of many suffering Athenians!

At one point they would put on a sense of responsibility by accepting his challenge, and yet when Socrates exposed the heavy burdens of governance, such as the requisite of strict social measures, not sparing their own kind, as well as the severity of the rule of virtues including the ban against property ownership and raising their own families, they complained that Socrates was making it hard for philosophers to govern.

The question is—did Socrates really want intellectually superior young males to govern the polis? I think the answer is no. Plato’s subtle warning about the noble lie—that it threatens the human condition—is addressed to the masculine order.

We may argue here that Socrates proposed the noble lie because his audience were males and posing as philosophers. In other words, Socrates did not want his sophistically inclined audience posing as philosophers to govern.

The noble lie is a secret pact among the guardians. Philosophically, the noble lie is the lie that there is truth. It becomes noble when the lie is concealed and projected as a certainty—that there is truth. The truth behind the lie is that only being gives truth, thus there is no truth independent of the power of being to invest and fabricate one. The aim is to keep this secret from the public where the stakes are much higher. The public must not discover this lie or anarchy reins.

The noble lie is the achievement of the singularity and unique difference of the guardians compared to the lack of identity of the masses or the commonality of the public. The lie is an achievement of elite and esoteric knowledge vis-à-vis the ignorance and common sense knowledge of the lower class delighting in superstition. But the guardians cannot declare and profess their achievements in the public realm. In short, the guardians must not practice their sophistry. Simply put, Socrates distrusted the male elite of his time.

But where are the women?

In fact, Plato added another restriction to the guardians after the restriction on practicing sophistry, that is, the prohibition to exercise the absolute singularity of the masculine by having absolute sexual right over a wife and emotional right over a progeny. Seemingly at all fronts the masculine is reduced to a machine.

The masculine loses its absolute singularity and therefore in essence it is non-existent. Again, where are the women? The women take place, and thus every woman is an event, but an event that happens outside of his-tory, after the loss of the ontological honor of the masculine. This loss of singularity is also connected to the victory of the Good. For Plato the ultimate object of philosophy is the Good. We can thus conclude that the birth of philosophy coincides with the death of the masculine. After the death of Man the order of justice emerges, otherwise the Good beyond being.

Philosophy is the name of the event of that death, the death of absolute singularity, otherwise the emergence of the other of singularity traditionally identified with reason. But then what is reason?

Isn’t it a noble lie to say that everything is rational? The noble lie that there is truth, and that it will set us free? In contrast, the pronouncement that there is ‘no truth, only being’, the anathema of the noble lie, brings up the otherwise than rational, the Good beyond Being which is beyond what the masculine can take.

For this the enemies of philosophy have branded Plato a homosexual and a diffident misandry. But if homosexuality means the assertion of one’s right to exercise sexuality then homosexuality is non-existent in ancient Greece. For the Greek pederasts like Socrates and Plato the practice of sexuality is a non-issue. The ancients exercised sexuality without supposing arbitrary difference and singularity of sexual freedom.

Yet despite the non-issue of sex among the male pederasts Plato remained suspicious of the upbringing of the young male elite, an upbringing greatly shaped by poetic mimesis based on the assumption that Man can only copy the Real.

But what was it that they actually tried to copy?

The noble lie tells us all: they would be reduced to copying nothing because they cannot reveal the truth. The truth that there is nothing to copy except what they chose to copy. And they chose to copy themselves to make of nothing something to begin with, which makes history, the history of Man, possible. Plato resented this idea. Copying is the business of singularity. Copying becomes a vicious cycle of the same. In the history of philosophy, the Same has acquired the name and currency of Reason, the culmination of absolute singularity and difference in terms of self-consciousness and the supremacy of knowledge over ignorance.

But what knowledge comes down to in the final analysis is the achievement of the consciousness of nothing, hence, the nihilism of reason. To break this nihilism Plato was the first one to propose the quest for the otherwise than rational (the rational that carries a chauvinistic weight), which he identified with the goal of philosophy.

§§§

In a number of ways Jacques Lacan helped carry through the analytic of the masculine started by Plato yet a long way from pursuing the radical intuitive direction of Plato’s unwritten feminism. The result is otherwise than Platonic: an apology for the sovereignty of the masculine and the superfluity of the feminine.

There is not much time to discuss the labyrinthine structure of Lacan’s thought here and thus I will be concentrating on one important concept relevant to the structure of my paper presentation. I will be concentrating on the Lacanian concept of the master-signifier, the phallus.

Fryer (2004) summarizes this concept of Lacan:

“Access to subjectivity in Lacan is access to language, and access to language is the ability to take up a position in relation to language’s master signifier—the phallus.”[1]

Sigmund Freud established this symbol of the phallus, of a fully erect penis, to refer to among others a psychic defense mechanism against castration. Castration does not only mean a physical threat which in primitive times was used as a punishment. Time is the greatest castrator, a metaphysical stumbling block to the satisfaction of human desire. The symbol of the phallus projects itself as either beyond time or that which is symbolic of time itself. As symbolic of time the phallus becomes an alpha castrator; acquires a supreme punitive power, a sovereign that has absolute right of sexual gratification.

The phallus projects omnipotence, but as such conceals a fundamental weakness, such as the biological and physical limit to erection that is also subject to the psychic economy of desire. By now it is understandable why the male psyche becomes the symbol of time itself, more correctly, a symbol of the alpha male, the Father as in Father Time. The symbol of the alpha male comes to constitute existence which is metaphysically impossible without time. In terms of the empirical structure of existence this symbol of male supremacy constitutes the authority of the Law.

For Lacan the subject is always already sexed by language from the time of birth, and as such is already within a social grid that is coextensive with language. [2]

What is more important to note here is that the subject is inevitably masculine, the locus of sexuality that is the locus of the subject, of being in the more intimate sense. Once again the importance of the phallus carries a universal weight. Even still, the phallus is not all.

As Lacan would argue “Where there is being, infinity is required.” [3] This infinity strikes at the heart of sexual gratification, which is not a gratification in the vulgar sense, rather one that makes society stable. For society to be stable it must allow for the play of infinity. Paradoxically, infinity is secured by the intriguing presence of the feminine, which represents a foil in the satisfaction of the male desire.

The feminine is the foil to male satisfaction precisely because the feminine is not whole (pas-tout), ontologically wise, not being. [4] For Lacan, strictly speaking, the woman does not exist. Ironically, the male desires the feminine in the same manner as being covets infinity, which is not being. This is described by Lacan as phallic jouissance, a form of gratification with much disappointment involved, like an orgasm that comes as a quick culmination of which under ordinary circumstances is sexually negotiated with a longer amount of time and a hefty amount of concentration.

However, though frustration is typical of phallic jouissance, the case of female gratification is much more problematic. As Lacan continues to argue: “[Woman’s] sexual organ is of no interest except via the body’s jouissance.”[5] But this jouissance no longer falls under the phallic command for obvious reason—a woman doesn’t have a penis.

Ruth Golan (2006) offers her own observation:

“As for women, according to Lacan they do not fall entirely under the authority of “phallic jouissance” but have an additional jouissance that cannot be expressed in words, if only because every act of speech entails a demand of sorts and every demand is on the phallic level (which women don’t have). Therefore, women have a surplus value of jouissance, which perhaps only mystics and poets know how to touch.” [6]

In other words, no male can ever satisfy this infinite called the female whose being not-whole, whose being not being is actually its strength. The female always demands sex. That is her strength. But she can only demand sex as long as the phallus exists, which however, as Lacan continues to argue, is a “self-perpetuating fiction.”[7]

If the phallus is not fictional, or if it is everything, then it is difficult to imagine a time for society and culture.

Though a fiction, it is a necessity for humanity to continue to survive. This is something Plato would find disconcerting. The fiction of the phallus guarantees the continuity of the noble lie which not only men desire to preserve. Women also desire the phallus.

In fact they desire it more than males do. Males desire the symbol of its power and thus desire its fictionality. As for women, they can tell us better. She wants it badly, according to Freud (which Lacan agrees). In this sense fiction must have a basis on material existence. The closest to a penis she could get is the clitoris, but it is tiny and cannot compete with a male organ.

But then the male organ desires the female organ whose need for the phallus renders the act of sex problematic. If the female organ wants to be a phallus, as it is the case, then what does it make of a male organ that desires the female organ? First, it would make the act of sex distinctly homosexual. But it is much complicated than that.

The male actually desires not the female organ—remember in Lacan the woman does not exist and so her actual body—but the organ’s jouissance. In other words, the male desires the female organ’s jouissance but also the female’s displeasure. Take note here that the female aspires to be the phallus herself, aspires to exist as a body and yet she cannot owing to her lack of actual male organ. In Lacanian terms to exist is to be a being on the phallic level. The complication goes even further.

The female desires and demands a phallic jouissance that the male cannot provide owing to one simple fact—phallic jouissance is narcissistic in nature. There is more, it is also fictional. The fiction of a fully erect determined sex organ, unflagging, dogged, resolute, but to all appearances autistic because it is always pointing to heaven at an unmovable fixed point. The female desires that autistic figure but it only exists in fiction. Overall, this makes the act of sex between a man and a woman a deeply problematic exercise.

But there is a way out of this fix if we take Lacan seriously. Even still, the solution is strictly phallic. The key word is love which is always a feminine concern.

For a woman to exist she must try herself to become a phallus but since it is impossible she can instead try to succumb to male desire, a desire that makes being or existence possible. Existence is neither existential nor ontological or phenomenological, neither scientific nor religious. It is through and through phallic in essence. And so a woman offers herself, her vagina’s jouissance to male desire in exchange of her becoming a phallus by accessory. To cap it all, a woman demands love from a man, ever oblivious to the fact that men are incapable of love if we mean love that tries to escape the authority of the phallus, unconditional love, so to speak.

Men can only accept love on condition that it serves their phallic jouissance. This is where Lacan credits the feminine, also capable of fakery and lying, that is, faking their phallic availability through arousing male desire in the hope of ensnaring him to love her eventually. And so most of the time the woman conceals her frustration by exposing instead other parts of her body while covering her sex organ—the vagina as the source of the sexual complication on the phallic level. [8]Her exposition of her other body parts, by means also of cosmeticizing her look short of revealing her skin, reveals her as a symptom, a symptom of phallic frustration.

Yet, lucky for women the phallus is a fiction. This also applies to the masculine that has no reason to rejoice over the prospect of the phallus ceasing to be fictional one day. On the one hand, if the phallus is Real women will abandon motherhood and child-rearing. On the other hand, because it is not all Real, men are guaranteed of rest and so are the chances of ending war which is nothing but a fight for the vagina’s jouissance.

Needless to say, society is founded on the infinite delay of male gratification and the conservation of the impossible demand of female sexuality which makes culture possible. In actual terms of social life this situation may be expressed as the necessity of faking the phallus through the ability to love. By and large, against Lacan’s expectations, this makes the feminine an all too important figure. Society would not be possible if the feminine never learned to fake men.

§§§§

In contrast to Jacques Lacan’s negative treatment Emmanuel Levinas’s view of feminine love is quite positive and admiring of her power, a power that issues from the mystery of the Other. The Other that as other cannot be contained and thus retains its alterity as the unassumable.

Fryer summarizes this aspect of Levinas’s view of the feminine love:

“The relationship of love with the feminine other is a relationship of failure. Love is an attempt at merging, but with the alter no such merging is possible. All that is possible is the caress, an attempt at contact, never the touch, the actual contact, if the otherness of the other is to be preserved. The subject moves to the other in the caress out of a desire he knows can never be achieved—the desire for unity.”[9]

If Lacan doubted the ability of the feminine to give love to the masculine, Levinas appreciates the feminine in terms of its ability to interrupt the illusion of unity most especially in the act of sex. Earlier, we said something to the effect that the masculine always attempts at unity, at the reduction of differences into the same. In Lacan, this reduction takes place in terms of phallic jouissance in which all forms of human enjoyment are dependent on the condition of the phallus.

But the unity of the sexes is neither guaranteed by the authority of the penis, nor by the seduction of the vagina, best illustrated in coital performance. The unity is inscribed in the scene of two bodies locked in their sex organs that does not move and must not allow for any interruption, the concentration must not be compromised, or it simply must stop at a fixed point of union.

This is how the unity of sex is transcribed into the logic of the Same. However, no such sex is possible. The union must be interrupted to give way to a set of motions, sometimes even unanticipated, each move is different from the other, from the previous ones that were also internally differentiated, such that the union is necessarily deferred, the union that by all means gestures the castration of the phallus.

The union means the termination of action and thus the beginning of the fiction called the permanently erect penis. Upon this termination the penis detaches itself from the illusion of unity, hence, the return to the fundamental difference of the sexes occupying two different sides of the bed.

From this fundamental discovery of the fiction of the phallus to how the phallus motivates the turn of history toward abstractive unity the history of the development of the One without the Other is crystallized by Western philosophy. This One is no less the masculine figure that dominates Western thought. In place of the reduction of differences, including sex, to the Same, Levinas advocates openness in connection with his concept of the Other.

For this to be possible in terms of recasting the history of philosophy, to renounce its fixation to the One and its reductive logic, Levinas seems to suggest that it must first see its beginning in how it can change sexual relation from which all transcendent forms of existence emerge. Against fixation to coitus or intercourse, Levinas suggests a more open approach to sex in terms of the caress:

“The caress is the mode of the subject’s being, where the subject who is in contact with another goes beyond this contact… The seeking of the caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks…The caress is…made of this increase of hunger, of ever richer promises, opening new perspectives onto the ungraspable.”[10]

The alternative offered by caress nevertheless attests to the failure of love to unite two sexed individuals, as Lacan earlier noted. If for Lacan love is some type of feminine deception, for Levinas its failure is a fact of existence. In place of love, Levinas prefers the voluptuous intention of the caress in which for him lies the future of sexual difference that will be less founded on the positive, male phallic or vaginal phallic, identity of subjectivity than the irreducibility of the otherness of each identity always voluptuous, always seeking for the other in the otherness of her ungraspable essence that cannot be contained by neither the sex organ nor even still by the aimless touch of the hand, hence, the guarantee of sexual passion that seems to know no end because aimless and without content, which “does not allow saturation but deepening.”[11]

Yet, in a situation where enjoyment is contained within the universe of two passions, the non-objectivity of the erotic in the caress, unlike the intercourse that has the organ as its objective, may even still fall into the hedonism of the phallic. In the pure eroticism of the caress, lovers are oblivious to one another—

“As long as both myself and the Other are immersed in oblivion regarding our mortality, we can indulge in erotic enjoyment and assume that this enjoyment will last.”[12]

Levinas does not say that we must eternally defer orgasm in favor of the eternal unforgiving caress between two sexually agitated individuals. He seems to discourage rather the privileging of objectless and aimless orgasm in order for sexuality of erotic enjoyment to mature in a certain direction. This direction is not a totalizable direction or the finality of enjoyment, rather its transcendence, which means an eroticism of a higher form, paradoxically an Eros without desire. This erotic direction has two forms: 1) without desire Eros begins to respect the otherness of the Other, its irreducibility that cannot be contained by desire, and 2) the transcendence of the erotic culminates in paternity, itself a nontotalizable direction.

On the one hand, Eros without desire engenders an erotic relationship in which the person is conscious of the other person as person, that she cannot be reduced into an erotic object, that the other person is fragile and therefore constitutes a foil to enjoyment that cannot last forever. The awareness of the limits of enjoyment, or the limits of the sexual partner, is a necessary preparation to a higher awareness of mortality, of death. On the other hand, the transcendence of the erotic in paternity, which for Levinas, cannot be made possible “without the fecundity of the feminine other,”[13] engenders a relationship in which a subject can relate to another subject that is totally nontotalizable, the child.

Levinas would argue that “I do not have my child” and yet, “I am in some manner my child.”[14] The child is the figure of an other that is irreducible to erotic enjoyment and ontological categories. Still, as Levinas would argue, the child would not be possible without the feminine other. Thus mother and child constitute the final foil to the authority of the phallus.

§§§§§

As Luce Irigaray correctly argued, this puts the feminine in a position of inferiority despite Levinas’s declared aims. The fecundity of the feminine is reduced to an orientation where the masculine finds himself transcended by a third term, the child. The feminine before the consciousness of her fecundity by the male, her fluidity, her promise to throw him into a delirium of joy, or before the masculine realizes the mortality of sex and therefore an end to his hedonism, is without an identity apart from her objectal place in the erotic enjoyment of the phallus.[15]

The feminine is ungraspable and it serves Man’s purpose—he takes no responsibility for her alterity. She is already other before Man meets her. Even still, Man invents the unassumable, the space of the other, before he allowed himself to officially meet a woman and make her a classifiable case. He rather finds responsibility in paternity through his child. It is therefore the male, like Levinas, who relegates the female into the unassumable, into an other whose function is to provide an opportunity for the male to overcome his sensuality. But what about the opportunity for the feminine? If she is ungraspable, what opportunity is in store for her?

Clearly, she has no opportunity in history. She may have one or two outside of history. A post-human order. Irigaray criticized the masculine order for its inability to renounce its nostalgia for the mother’s womb that explains the male obsession for phallic unity. (Her criticism applies both to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Levinas’s philosophy of the Other which are made possible by the centrality of the male figure in their texts).

The truth of the matter is men cannot have sex with their mothers—only their fathers are entitled to that. To compensate for this failure, men invented the phallic mother, the mother as the possessor and keeper of the phallus, at the same time castrator, which in many ways is correct. Mothers bear in their wombs the generation of sons who would be fathers. Mothers were phallic until the fathers forbid the sons to think lewd of their mothers. In the absence of the fathers, the mothers in honor of their husbands assume the function of the castrator. Men however think lewd of women who are not their mothers. Thanks for the prohibition of the fathers. Men learned the wonders of the Eros that they were prevented to experience with their mothers, including their sisters, and those barred from them by consanguinity. But women would be mothers some day. For the time being men would enjoy the hedonism of Eros and until women offered them the opportunity to overcome their nostalgia through bearing their children, men can enjoy the symptom called the feminine. But children grow fast which give men another opportunity to recover from transcendence.

The closest thing to redemption the feminine could have is the Levinasian caress which places the feminine in a non-objectal situation in the erotic enjoyment, because her vagina is not the priority and therefore keeps her dignity, her virginity, keeps her from bearing his child—in this situation, her lips and her mouth take the place of the function of genital enjoyment by which she keeps her virginity intact, and yet nothing in this caress changes the order of the act of caress, from the one who caresses to the one caressed.

It is only a matter of time before she becomes pregnant with his child. A million free condoms will have no use. Condoms cannot change the way men perform sex. Once, men unloaded their juices in a place they knew by instinct. Today the slime and smell will be Mother Nature’s job to handle and dispose of.

Thank you for listening.

End Notes

[1] David Ross Fryer, Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2004), 85.

[2] Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Paul Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1997), 284.

[3] Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX, trans. Bruce Fink, ed. J.A. Miller (New York: Norton, 1998), 10.

[4] Ibid., 7,

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ruth Golan, Loving Psychoanalysis: Looking at Culture with Freud and Lacan (London: Karnac, 2006), 5; parenthetical underscoring mine.

[7] Fryer, Intervention, 96.

[8] Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, “On Women and the Phallus,” in The Symptom, 10, [2010].

[9] Fryer, 75.

[10] Ibid., 76.

[11] Tanja Staehler, Plato and Levinas. The Ambiguous Out-side of Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2010), 81.

[12] Ibid., 83.

[13]  Fryer, Intervention, 77.

[14] Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 91.

[15] See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993).

Heto na, sasabihin ko na

Love is a climate change

I knew that day was never like any color
Or because I heard your indiscernible murmur
Begging, pleading for rain.

I knew that night was never like a time to dream.
It was a night like no other void.

I could stare at the moon and see everything.
That night I saw the day remaking its purpose.

“Weather, weather lang yan.”
Translation ni Daniel:
“Ah, when it rains, it pours!”

[Para kay Daniel]

In-between

(Imagine the space between van Gennep and Turner)

 

If you lost your dreams because you tucked them away

In your undies
Don’t blame God for that unshakable virginity.

Don’t waste it by making your lips do the talking,
Where lips can fly the coop to embrace its jouissance,
Which is what it is: an orgasm you can never have.

That familiar gash you loaned to the custody of time–

Don’t you care how it cuts a space where you can write?
Where you can live within a liminal time of present,

Like a primitive when she rolled her eyes in strange joy,
She who flourished in vagueness, even so, kept her dignity?

Isn’t it she who prays that God remands her lips to manhood
Without having to worry about the labels of poetry?

What is poetry?

Don’t you think it’s all juju?

Don’t you think it’s time to unmake love
And get real in-between the sheets?