OPENING TO CONTINGENCY Marcus Steinweg 1. Art is an opening to contingency. 2. To assert a form means to make chaos precise. 3. The mode of being of art, Cornelius Castoriadis says, lies in “giving form to chaos”. 4. Art is a “window on chaos” by trying to give it a form. 5. To give chaos a form means to give form to the formless without neutralizing the intensity of formlessness. 6. The unveiling of chaos tears off the veil of ephemeral evidence. 7. It leads toward the incommensurable. 8. Art and philosophy actually live from the difficulty in identifying the cosmos in chaos, a certain order in disorder, and also the chaos in the cosmos. 9. At the point of this difficulty, questions concerning the relationship between being and non-being, presence and absence, stasis and kinesis ignite. 10. The artwork is the arena for this ignition which blocks itself off from its dialectical becalming. 11. The work neither belongs simply to established realities, the world, nor does it transfigure itself into a passage to an ideal beyond. 12. In both art and philosophy it is a matter of rejecting the false alternatives of realism and idealism in order to welcome a difficulty and incommensurability which dialectical reconciliation tends to cover up rather than to have it out. 13. The friendship between art and philosophy is the friendship of this affirmative refusal which comprises the courage to affirm chaos, resisting the pusillanimities of a blunt refusal of chaos or an adoration of it, its monumentalization into a sublime authority. 14. The subject of art and of philosophy touches itself by relating itself to chaos as the emptiness of its essential determination, to the dimension of a conflict that cannot be mediated. 15. Heidegger calls this conflict the “strife between clearing and concealment”, the “twofoldness of world and earth”, alétheia and léthe, disclosedness and concealment. 16. In the essay on the work of art and in his lectures on Parmenides in the winter semester of 1942/43, we can witness this vacillation on Heidegger’s part in view of an urléthe which, prior to the origin, corrupts the simple opposition between dis-closedness and concealment. 17. The opposition between alétheia (disclosedness) and léthe (concealment) cannot be decided in favour of a simple disclosedness or openness. 18. Rather, truth (alétheia) comprises the impossibility of such a decision, the impossibility of neutralizing léthe in alétheia, chaos in the cosmos: “Concealmeant hence permeates the primordial essence of truth” (M. Heidegger). 19. There is no knowledge that does not remain left behind in this concealment, in this not-knowing and this closure. 20. Knowing includes that it does not know. 21. Of this kind is the knowledge of philosophy and the knowledge of art. Art and philosophy know that knowledge is not everything. 22. They know about the fragility of any knowledge. 23. Therefore, for them, it cannot be a matter of avoiding knowledge and what can be known, as propagated by a popular anti-intellectualism, but rather, it is always a matter of extending the dimension of what can be known and of keeping it differentiated, complex. 24. The analytical power (understanding in the Hegelian sense of the word), reflection on determinants and conditions, insight into the complexity of state of affairs, sensibility for the historical, cultural, social and economic codification of knowledge are the precondition for artistic and philosophical production, but they do not constitute any work. 25. The work comprises the transgressing and transcending of its conditions, the corruption of its own will, the unexaminability of its origin, the illegitimacy of its appearance. 26. If art has something to do with truth, then in the following sense: instead of revealing truths like facts, the artwork is the place where truth and facts diverge since facts, in the light of their uncovering, block out the chaotic non-ground which itself does not appear in the light of facts and, by definition, cannot appear. 27. To touch truth means to make contact with this non-ground which Castoriadis (and also Žizek), following Hegel, denotes as the “night of the world”. 28. In the well-known passage from the Jena Real Philosophy, Hegel sketches this ghostly scenario touching upon the subject qua subject: “The human being is this night, this empty nothingness containing everything in its simplicity, a wealth of infinitely many ideas, images none of which simply occurs to it or which are not present. This is the night, the interior of nature that exists here — pure self. In phantasmagoric imaginations all around it is night; here a bloody head shoots forth, there another white shape suddenly shoots out and likewise disappears. You see this night when you look a human being in the eye, into a night which becomes terrible; the night of the world is here suspended before you.” 29. The night of the world is another name for the chaos which the subject’s subjectivity is. 30. The subject’s self-confrontation demands of it that it open up to this zone which is as abundantly rich as it is empty. 31. It is the domain of something real which has not yet assumed the form of reality, the dimension of an “abyss” (abîme) marking the “infinite possibility of representation”. 32. The artwork, as well as the subject, is related to this abyss, to this lack of focus that makes its stabilization within the established area of reality difficult. 33. Truth is a name for this instability which tears the work as well as the subject beyond itself into the night of the indefinite. 34. Therefore, instead of comprehensibility, art comprises clarity (transparence), because clarity evokes the limit of what can be understood. 35. The artwork’s transparency opens it to an intransparency which is originally a part of it. 36. To make chaos precise means to articulate this transparency to intransparency. In this sense, art is an assertion of form by tailoring a form to the opening to formlessness, which relates the subject of this tailoring to what is unmeasurable. 37. One has to gather the courage to connect the always headless assertion, as which the artwork remains, with the clarity of an unsecured making-precise that evades the dictates of comprehensibility and communication. 38. The assertion of the work is not headless as though it were simply subjective or arbitrary. 39. Although every assertion comes from the indeterminate subjectivity of the artist-subject, it nevertheless refuses for itself the expressive gesture of an expression of ego (on this Badiou has said what is necessary to say) and the correlative metaphysics of interiority. 40. It refuses the option for itself of narcissistically making an enigma of oneself, which is the hallmark of bad art.
Posted on: Sun, 04 May 2014 10:55:54 +0000
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