Friday, 2 March 2018



To say that suffering is resistance is only to argue against its being the fundamental reality; it is to say that it is secondary to will, to the conatus essendi, to the drive to existence, no matter how sublimated or spiritualised that may be. It is not to ignore its external and meliorable causes, but not to stop with them either. The potential for suffering only ceases with death. It is a matter of the alignment between the will and the conditions in which it finds itself, and as between these the will retains the freedom to change its direction, to modify this alignment. (And are not the conditions also ultimately expressions of the will?) This freedom may be only notional, the ability to suddenly turn around and embrace what is destroying you, to love your symptom, or indeed your disease. Would there be suffering if there were not this notional freedom - as some doubt the sufferings of other forms of life? But the will is not the will, it is the whole complex that has blossomed out of its engagement with itself, the working spectrum of resistances and countervalences, the heart of the heart of the matter. Suffering is not an error or a mistake, it is a crossing point.

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