Friday, 23 February 2018



The paradox of desire is that is that desire perishes in its own success. This needs to be stated in relation to a specific goal: if you desire X then on attaining X your desire for it dissolves. But another desire arises to fill its place... and often this is precisely the desire to desire X again. So your multitudinous desires transform into the desire to desire, both requiring and resisting gratification. A similar paradox arises in terms of will: you will X, and when X is achieved your will perishes and you go into a depressive state from which you can only be roused by the awakening of a new object to fix your will on. In this case there is no question, as there is with desire, of wanting to repeat the cycle exactly, the will does not look back, it bears a different relation to time. Desire is timeless, but will seeks renewal in the new. There is a realisation of the redundancy of the object, what will enjoys is the exercise of will, the power of achievement in the abstract, the will to will is the will to power. But since will must have an object the understanding of its redundancy can only be expressed by making the object absurd. Again there is a similar pattern for consciousness as knowingness: it is an appetite for assimilating its object, and once it has known this object through and through it incorporates it into the context, ceases to be conscious of it, and seeks to know the larger object which only now becomes available to it. Consciousness 'seeks' absolute consciousness, for which the absurd can only represent an isolated moment. Desiring, willing, knowing, each in some sense 'knows' its own map, 'knows' the structure or the rhetoric of its world. They are enactments within a 'space' in which the unfolding of such a rhetoric is axiomatic. 

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