[...]senchantment
charisma-based society ~=> disenchanted bureaucratic society
charisma: (paranormal) force field that surrounds and penetrate us with *healing + destructive* consequences
(<-- this is super ok as long as that force field is not curated by wannabe spiritual philosopher human)
bestiary: paranormal excluded by religion
agricultural societies monopolized charisma (--> king) --> logistical functioning of the world of agriculture ==> global warming
neolithic privatization of enchantment ==> monotheism
Holocene --> strategy of survival at any cost
(Morton echoing the cliche of artists wanna do magic:) “art is demonic”: it emanates (not designed) from beyond sense that the artist is not in charge of, dangerous causative flicker
~ ‘art = charisma’ [= cause & effect]
--Morton--> (bad idea of) art ==> charismatic causality
force-like animal magnetism
magic = causality + illusion
appearance and essence are two different sides of Mobius strip
(pre-neolithic -->) *we live in a world of tricksters* (raindrops are tricksters,,,)
incomprehensible charisma of kitsch
(the objects in my room contain a palpable enjoyment that is without me, found objects that spray charismatic causality [without devotion or trust])
...................................
(Zizek's) Lacan four discourses via porn actress facial stages:
1- ecstatic state --> overwhelmed
2- serious --> hard work, instrumental control
3- boredom --> ignorance, indifference
4- mocking --> is this all you can do, smile
...................................
body...
how to feed it
when to fast
how to soothe
moisturize
let go
heal
you can't grasp your body once and for all --> one can only bear witness and offer testimony (<--Avital-- this is why writing is so often bound up with illness, “writer = invalid”)
cultural phantasms of bodily mutation
the body never stays put long enough to form self-identity --(this is why)--> our ancestors used to fast-forward and just lose it [transcending the body]
in Dostoevsky
body is variously insulted and humiliated --> subjected to injury (an injury capable of language and disclosure)
--> idiocy offered a delicate conflagration of soma + psyche
illness: the stealth master (the teacher whose lesson is unremittingly opaque yet purposeful)
(when you get hurt -->) body: “Honey, I’m home, I am your home.”
your body fighting for you
healing without cure
illness --Avital--> essentially related to the experience of injustice ~= your Geworfenheit
• illness visits you at will and does what it wants to your body (stinging surfaces you didn’t know you had)
•illness gives access to the devotional mode of surrender (abandoning to itself something other than the self)
•illness brings with it an alternative system of ecstasy and meaning
•*illness: an inescapable condition of being*
-
(Dostoevsky's Myshkin) suffers a sacred illness
[your?] heritage -->
backed up by literature
backed up by philosophy
claimed by mythology
*epilepsy* (has a place in the history of thought) --> the Idiot's illness
•between psyche & soma
•between the *theory of trauma* (which focuses the history of the subject) & the *theory of fantasy* (which refers to transference and countertransference)
•the only illness to have its own mythological figure -->
•madness
•visionary excess
herald of epilepsy: Hercules, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoléon, Lord Byron, Pascal, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, etc.
foolishness
drunkards
maniacs
the pathologically resentful
the envious
a rapist
a crowd of cheaters
classic neurotics
subjects of delusional rantings
subjects of criminal intent
conscious =/= unconscious =/= drive
contract to his illness
manipulations of care
the sick often find someone who is even sicker to take care of (<-- the case with the Prince)
(according to Nancy -->) literature has always tried to produce the body (which philosophy suppresses)
any discussion of the body risks engaging a double bind (a psychosis):
•failure to produce a discourse on the body
•failure not to produce discourse on the body
--Nancy--> *the sick body* (in a frenzied state of belated, compensatory awakening) --demands--> a reading (interpretive and diagnostic strategies) that often culminate in *an excess of discourse* ==> opens up the space of necessary obscurity by which our bodies come to us
Nancy --> The body does not know; but it is not ignorant either. Quite simply, it is elsewhere. It is from elsewhere, another place, another regime, another register [not an “obscure” knowledge, or a “pre-conceptual” knowledge, or a “global,” “immanent,” or “immediate” knowledge]
•philosophy calls “body” presupposes the determination of something like an
authority of “immediate knowledge,” a contradiction in terms, which inevitably becomes “mediated” (as “sensation,” “perception,” synaesthesia, and as immense reconstitutions of a presupposed “representation”)
the site of nonknowledge that the body traverses --Nancy--> *is related to thought* <-- the body thinks (in a sense) beyond giving or making sense
==> *thought is itself a body*
-Heidegger was the one who unhitched “thought” from philosophical operations and gave it weighs in as body ==> Nancy
in Dostoevsky --> the body commended by *illness* bears a memory trace of the *sacred* (+ finitude of all bodies)
“God is dead = God no longer has a body” ==Nancy==> bodies (bereft of trickle-down symbolicity) will have to be:
•pumped up
•prosthetically amplified
•steroid-enhanced
•“built”
•buffed
•bionically ensured
•drugged
•“medicated”
•cloned
•remade
==> the technobody or replicant will be made to substitute for the lost body of the divine trait
last night he dreamed of (apocalypse technological dominion:) spread of the railroad and the distribution of connectors installed by new technologies as instigators of the unsacrificeable...
(in literature) apocalypse = vehicle (a technological momentum)
the unnamed God has vanished together with this unnameable thing...
Myshkin’s illness still binds him to the sacred --> this body retains and persists in making sense, the illness continues to produce sense
...poverty, hunger, deportation, torture, deprivation, ugliness, horror --> bodies sacrificed to nothing
[*]sacrifice: a body's passage to a limit where it becomes the body of a community
(after Christ -->) body is nothing but a wound =/= illness
(when it persists) pain ==> I'm not well, I'm in trouble, therefore I am.
jouissance: a pain that succeeds <-- a place where being, utterly exposed, is external to itself
[*]body: surplus of objectivity
our body acts as a traumatic place (that causes a series of failures)
(idiot's seizure) epilepsy
Then suddenly something seemed torn asunder before him; his soul was flooded with intense inner light. The moment lasted perhaps half a second, yet he clearly and consciously remembered the beginning, the first sound of the fearful scream which broke of itself from his breast and which he could not have checked by any effort. Then his consciousness was instantly extinguished and complete darkness followed.
(going to fetal position)
seizure: an enactment of a wish to return to the womb
epilepsy --Sutterman--> sadomasochistic phantasms that feature the self as murdered child
breaking a prized vase
delivering rants in place of conversation
Dostoevsky's idiot:
•repugnant
•uncanny
•a kind of Bataillean reversal (at bottom is unmistakably Christian)
•provokes love
according to Dostoevsky: *idiot ==provoke==> love*
Faust had reported that two souls inhabit his body [==> switching body types] {--> two sick bodies} (hallucinated + internalized)[...]