THE ICE MAY BREAK Marcus Steinweg 1. Looking things in the face, seeing them as they are, has always been a challenge to philosophical and artistic minds, from Plato to Husserl. 2. Which also means sometimes looking away from things in order to see them. 3. That is the abstraction: seeing based on looking away. 4. A kind of constitutive drift. 5. In order to see, I have to be able to not see. 6. I have to trust in a blindness that renders seeing. 7. What does the blind person see? 8. What is the object? 9. I believe that what blind eyes see is something beyond the visible. 10. A beyond that is is in the here and now, in the midst of reality. 11. It is certainly not about subscribing to some absolute external (the external — dehors — has long since been internalised, as we already know from psychoanalysis as well as from the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Jacques Derrida). 12. It is neither about Utopia nor Erewhon, nor about some perceived Paradise. 13. The view that reaches into the invisible probes the substance of the visible. 14. It is a view in touch with nothingness. 15. Touching nothingness – encountering something that has no place in reality, which is precisely why Jacques Lacan deems it real – is what can be described as a traumatic experience. 16. It implies the experience of ongoing dissolution. 17. Dissolution of the body, dissolution of thought. 18. Nothingness persists in the heart of reality. 19. It dwells in the midst of the subject. 20. The subject takes the place of nothingness. 21. It is, as Heidegger describes, its „place-holder“ [Platzhalter]. 22. Reality is what I would call the economically, historically, culturally, aesthetically, socially, politically coded environment in which we exist, and which determines our disparate world without a backdrop – a world that is ultimately a fragile zone of factuality based on conventions and agreements, yet groundless. 23. It is the no longer grounded ground that represents our logos-based universe – the domain of institutionalised horizons of meaning and promises of significance. 24. This is where the human subject ventures onto thin, though not entirely unreliable, ice. 25. The ice may break. 26. But in order to break, it has to form some ground on which the subject can move surely, at least for a moment. 27. It is this fragile ground that Nietzsche’s tenet of the death of god and the self-awareness of subject leaves behind. 28. Nietzsche bequeathed to posterity a groundless ground. 29. A groundless ground is a magic carpet. 30. It is architecture floating above the abyss of ontological inconsistency. 31. Reality is what I call this web of consistency, which remains permeable to the ontological inconsistency that has been described by Friedrich Nietzsche as the dionysian abyss, by Jean-Paul Sartre as the void of freedom, by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari as chaos, and by Jacques Lacan as the real. 32. Reality is the indice of its own fragility. 33. Ludwig Wittgenstein addresses reality in terms of a language game or form of life, approximating Lacan‘s symbolic order. 34. The subject is embedded in reality as in an environment that has no alternative. 35. Reality having no alternative does not mean that it necessarily has to be the way it is. 36. The truth of reality is its contingency.
Posted on: Tue, 06 May 2014 23:48:12 +0000
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