It is the whole life of the other that affects us when we come into contact, a life of which we know even less than of our own, and what we are aware of, the mirrorings, the cannibalisations, the thefts, the simulacra, all so drastically effective, are yet hardly real but occur as variations in our, and their, ever resumed, ever collapsing process of self creation, each inside our separate monads. This is literal contingency, to touch and be touched, a contingency that is essential to us as much to maintain what we have as to gain new ground, although it is always misunderstood when regarded as our own project, as if we ever possessed the dignity to own anything. If the living is made to seem, as it so often is, like the particular task within our gift then we ought to consider that we ourselves are one of life's scattershot responses to its own stubborn brief. We are a venture thrown out into the void by a blind desire to stake everything, even when we ourselves would stake next to nothing. And so the peculiarly excessive gravity, or planet, waves that affect us when we are drawn into close proximity with another.

He was a knot of circumstances held in a tight but fundamentally unstable equilibrium with all the others with whom he came into contact, who were themselves tight knots of circumstances... That all this was made out of pictures and stories was clear from the appetite for stories and pictures they all shared and the occasionally disproportionate response to a rash word or a phrase which suggested that something vital was at stake. What exactly this vital something was was not clear, but the effects were familiar enough, giving and taking, that his defensiveness seemed prudent. Each other was a flexible distorting mirror to him as he was to them, and if he was allowed to enjoy mugging or twirling his moustaches before one he might grow too convex and return a disfiguring image to the other, failing in reciprocity, bringing on a reversal of the effect. None of this could ever be got right, but that wasn't the point, it was rather that it kept going on, kept being the most absorbing game in town.

The impossible object is known to be impossible implicitly in the willing itself - in it the promesse de bonheur is shattered, but we adamantly refuse to admit this to ourselves - it is its way of willing to will, and of desiring to desire, and is an act of separation from what we can't bear to let go of. It is also a form of self-assertion, the form it takes before there is a self to properly assert, so that it is experienced as something that comes over us, a heteronomy that drags us into self-centredness, forces what we will come to believe is autonomy. As if it is an echo of our birth and its terrible contingency, the correlative feeling is a huge fear, a seemingly bottomless pool of fear that, now we are far from the shore, we only meet with in the small hours, when, their momentum now stalled, the pathetic frangibility of all our projects is borne upon us. Themes from our own life, from the lives of others, from history, biology and astronomy, assume equal dimensions, mingle promiscuously and float unmoored in the irredeemable. The knowledge that desire can never be satisfied Janus-like points both ways: it makes all our myriad desires possible by allowing us to confuse assuagement with satisfaction and satisfaction with freedom and finality.

Where we seem somewhat free is only in our thinking; this is when will is in service to the process of thought which does not so much solve problems as harness the unconscious forces that do so. In cognitivist terms it works something like this: to freely choose the elements we will imaginatively accept as limiting our position and then, entering in to that constrained position, to see what conclusion emerges, and then to revise that conclusion, within the more restricted field of choice we are permitted with respect to outcomes, reflectively - actually recursively - by adding an evaluation of it to the initial position as a further constraint. And to continue in this way until we are satisfied. The positions it works with are ones in which we might find ourselves and so these preclude going back to a time before we were insufficiently formed to be present any where. Thought breaks off in this direction but the memory latent in will can perhaps go further. This means to discover pure unassuageable desire in a will that infantilises us not through being the will to will but desire fixed upon an impossible object. But seen up close these last are not so very different at all.

In childhood, before our character and individuality is thought to have fully developed we have our most complete experiences of willing, capricious, unstable and not yet separated from wishing as they may be; an adult's will is no match for that of a child, although his power is very much greater. In the same way the child's experience of himself as a complete individual forms the ideal which the adult mind, still bleeding from its narcissistic wounds, from the annexation of a theory of mind, seeks to reconstitute in a sublated and sublimated way through art, science and other gratifications. In addition there is an absolute of feeling in the form of sympathetic feeling, entirely devoid of empathy, feeling which is projected so that the child's world is pantheistic, or more accurately non-dual, in that his intimacy with all things is unquestioned. It is extraordinary that none of our hard-acquired wisdom can ever undermine the depth of this infantile metaphysics, if has gone far enough then it rather seeks to devour itself so as better to know this earliest world for the first time. The mode of sensitive perception in our most valued experiences in which distinctions melt into a dancing play of subject and object is a trace, more or less direct, of that infantile pantheism.

Doing never flags. We are always doing something but the intensity of our doing occupies a wide range with at one end the association with a positive will which strives to bring something about that is not yet the case, and at the other a negative will, the refraining from doing anything to hinder what is already underway. In this sense, and apart perhaps from certain exceptional automatisms, doing can be equated with willing, and together with thinking and feeling it forms one of the dimensions of being. It is a temptation to seek the absolute of will in a putative free-will because the notion of latter is of something independent and free-standing, outside of the endless flow in which all doing in caught up. Free-will is indispensable as a framing device for understanding and committing to certain kinds of actions, decisive in a life-historical sense, but it is incoherent as an ontological category, as a type of thing. The position of the absolute of will thus remains open and we must look to the adventures of our doing. To be born 'into this breathing world' is to be born into doing, as breathing is the very gauge of action, conscious and unconscious, heavy or suspended and so on. In addition the relations to the other have their own formations in doing through the distinctions of activity and passivity, of doing and being done to, of dominance and submission, as well as of doing with and its integration and interplay with feeling and knowing in intimate experience.  

 

Certain popular songs seem to not only evoke deep longings but to do so in a way that is universal for, if not everyone, then all who belong to the same broad cultural wave, citizens of a certain epoch. They may do this by drawing on biblical overtones or such overtones may arise due to the broad embrace that is part of the song's presentation, earning it the epithet of anthem. Part of what our cultural knowledge contributes in bringing the song before us is a sense of the breadth of its address, a quantitative and qualitative dimension inseparable from its pragmatic meaning. Music offers to make us a part of its audience and our taste may be for the audience we wish to be counted in as much as for the music itself. When the offered audience overflows the distinctions by which we foster our identity, or rather when it offers the idea of such an overflowing, then the music takes on a spiritual, almost solemn quality. In a concert songs of this kind are reserved to late in the performance, after the audience has been suitably primed, one watches the singer become the impossible incarnation of the song's emotions, a powerful will completely surrendered in the moment to its unchecked flow; but behind them the accompanists, while focused, seem oddly detached, their eyes abstracted and filled with quiet irony. For them this is the repetition of a technical exercise whose results are entirely predictable. The effects of this spiritual machine however are equally strong, or even stronger, when any of its attendant ironies are added to it. Only a paltry spirituality is put off by irony, a robust one eats it. This is just because what makes it spirituality is the harmonic sublation of the boundaries of the self, while irony is an elaboration of those boundaries. It deserves to be counted as one of Michelstaedter's 'ornaments of darkness'.